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June 28, 2005
The smart parameter number c0
This post is written in Firefox, running on top of Linspire 5.0. Thanks to my friend David Orban, I´ve got to install Linspire on my laptop and play a little bit with it (more on this later). That is the good news.
The bad news is that my newly purchased WD Scorpio 80GB laptop HDD is showing some worrying behavior.
What is not obvious from the screenshot above, is that the SMART attribute number 192 (or C0 if your prefer hex) is constantly decreasing. It has dropped about 50 units since I´ve installed the disk in my Thinkpad and it keeps doing that at a steady rate. If the trend continues, the Emergency Retract Cycle Count or the Power off Retract Count as other products call it, will reach 0 in about two weeks. Otherwise, the disk seems to be working just fine - I wonder if this is maybe the normal behavior?
The SMART parameter 192 is not very well documented. Moreover, it is only implemented by some disks manufacturers, for instance WD and Quantum. Basically, it´s a differential SMART parameter, showing the difference between normal and unexpected head retraction due to power off. Given the parameter is constantly decreasing, I take it the disk heads somehow presume the power is being cut off and they quickly run for the parking position during normal operation. One cause which comes to mind is the lack of a proper power output from the laptop. Which is not entirely impossible.
If this is really the case, then it´s obvious the little 80GB Scorpio 2.5¨ WD800VE HDD is incompatible with IBM Thinkpad T23. Yikes.
Posted by Costin Raiu at June 28, 2005 1:07 PM
Comments
I just detected 16 bad blocks on my Hitachi 60GB from my iBook. And guess what? The S.M.A.R.T. status in MacOS says everything is fine. :|
Right now I'm trying to find a program for MacOS that shows me all the counters...
Posted by: Razvan Musaloiu-E. at June 30, 2005 5:48 PM
See below:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
"Darwin (Mac OSX) support (ATA disks only) was added by Geoff Keating in July, 2004" :-)
Posted by: Costin Raiu at June 30, 2005 6:27 PM
Thanks for the tip about smartmontools. I new about it but I didn't notice it's also working in Darwin. A funny/strange thing: while I was cvs-downloading the package my Hitachi drive hanged. :| After I rebooted I choose Linux (to take a look to the SMART params ;-)) but a lot of errors prevented the boot to complete. :-(
After some adventures I manage to install a new HDD (a FUJITSU MHU2100AT at 4200 RPM :P). I just compiled and run the smartmontools under MacOS and I found the 192/C0 counter. The current value is 100, the worse value is 100 (quite understandable) and the threshold is 0.
Posted by: Razvan Musaloiu-E. at July 9, 2005 3:05 PM
So, you've got youreslf a new 100GB laptop HDD. Congrats and have the best of it! :-)
In the meantime, my WD Scorpio's 192/C0 counter has reached 1. No strange noises, read errors or anything suspicious, yet I am sure it must be something odd with the drive causing all these. 193/C1 is also decreasing, now at 137.
And another SMART-related problem: I've got a extra SATA 200GB drive for my AMD64 machine, which Linux sees as "/dev/sda". The good part is that the disk is fast, very fast. The bad part is this:
"SATA disks accessed via libata are not currently supported by smartmontools. When libata is given an ATA pass-thru ioctl() then an additional '-d libata' device type will be added to smartmontools."
Oh well, I'll probably have to accept that I'm just not lucky when it comes to dealing with SMART devices. ;)
Posted by: Costin Raiu at July 9, 2005 3:40 PM