Recently Storage JM, Jonmichael Hands of Chia Network, gave an incredibly detailed overview of hard drive SMART attributes. This is something that is really poorly understood, even among a long of IT professionals, and a lot of assumptions are made about what the various values mean. Very similar to how TBW and write amplification is poorly understood but frequently discussed.
That does not happen here, and JM’s expertise is on full display. This is the table of SMART attributes available on Wikipedia, and it is fairly good if you already have an idea of what you’re looking for but I think that everyone who is a little unsure of what they are doing I highly recommend JM’s video here.
The only thing I would change is I wish he had written out in detail the information he goes over in the video either on the Chia.net blog or on ChiaDecentral. This is the kind of thing a quick reference would be a great companion to go with the video. So as a quick value-add the most important ones, and he goes over that here (although its been a few days so we might have some discrepancies) are:
- 5 – Reallocated sector count
- 10 – Spin retry count
- 187 – Reported uncorrectable errors
- 197 – Current pending sector
- 198 – Offline uncorrectable
And he does mention the CRC count, but I want to reiterate that when you add a new SATA drive always check that value after a little bit since a lot of SATA cables are actually garbage and if you see that counter going up change your SATA cable or your drive will be mad at you forever. Check out his video below, and pay attention, and also check out the conversation I recently had with JM alongside Digital Spaceport here.
