Re: [smartmontools-support] False alarm for drives which ran without SMART since factory? How to interpret overall health self assessment test result FAILED for these drives?

[Stefan N. <p....@gm...>]

Gabrielle: Thanks for your estimation, that this incident was quite  
bizarre, and likely indeed a false alarm. Any other evaluations?

All: Shall we just close this issue as "rare bizarre incident, done"  
or could it possibly point towards a fault within smartctl (or its  
warning messages), which should be addressed?

Regards, Stefan Nowak


On 21.02.2011 at 23:49 Gabriele Pohl wrote:

> On 02/16/2011 04:41 PM, Stefan Nowak wrote:
>
>>  SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
>>  Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
>>  No failed Attributes found.
>
> I read this list for several years now,
> but never heard of such a case before.
>
>> a) my client reported this drive as "only used for a few hours within
>> a hard disk audio recorder" with no remembrance about incidents, and
>> which was stored carefully.
>> b) it seemed that this drive simply had SMART deactivated since it
>> left the factory.
>
> Strange, that the vendor didn't check the SMART values
> for quality assurance before delivering it.
>
>> This is how I continued: I enabled SMART via --smart=on and after  
>> that
>> the query results were quite ok, no bad values whatsoever. I let it
>> run for a few times, ran a short test, a long test, powercycled the
>> drive several times (the longest off-power period was 1 day), and all
>> these my events were later correctly reflected in SMART values (= my
>> hand written log matched with the SMART log).
>>
>> So, is my assumption right, that it was in deed a false alarm?
>
> For me it also sounds like this.
>
>> If so, please update the warning message.
>> Or else, please inform me what this
>> could, and how I should handle these situations. Thanks.
>
> I suppose it's not a very relevant case, as it's
> the first time this is reported in my time here.
> You may create a ticket for this:
> https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/newticket