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Sebastian Mares
Hey guys!

Some of you might remember that my Samsung HDD had problems a few days ago and therefore I was forced to delay the start of my 48 kbps listening test by one week. In the meanwhile, the HDD is working well, but these SMART values look a bit weird, especially the "Raw Read Error Rate" and the "Hardware ECC Recovered" ones:

CODE
--------[ EVEREST Home Edition ]----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Version EVEREST v2.20.405
Homepage http://www.lavalys.com/
Report Type Report Wizard
Computer SEBASTIA-AEB1A3
Generator Systemadministrator
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition 5.1.2600 (WinXP Retail)
Date 2006-11-25
Time 16:11


--------[ SMART ]-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ SAMSUNG SP2514N (S08BJ1HL203811) ]

01 Raw Read Error Rate 51 100 100 4 OK: Value is normal
03 Spin Up Time 25 100 100 6208 OK: Value is normal
04 Start/Stop Count 0 100 100 724 OK: Always passing
05 Reallocated Sector Count 10 253 253 0 OK: Value is normal
07 Seek Error Rate 51 253 253 0 OK: Value is normal
08 Seek Time Performance 15 253 253 0 OK: Value is normal
09 Power-On Time Count 0 100 100 1231 OK: Always passing
0A Spin Retry Count 51 253 253 0 OK: Value is normal
0B Calibration Retry Count 0 253 100 0 OK: Always passing
0C Power Cycle Count 0 100 100 381 OK: Always passing
BB <vendor-specific> 0 96 96 5 OK: Always passing
BE <vendor-specific> 0 139 109 33 OK: Always passing
C2 Temperature 0 139 109 33 OK: Always passing
C3 Hardware ECC Recovered 0 100 100 33944442 OK: Always passing
C4 Reallocation Event Count 0 253 253 0 OK: Always passing
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0 253 100 0 OK: Always passing
C6 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 253 253 0 OK: Always passing
C7 Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate 0 200 200 0 OK: Always passing
C8 Write Error Rate 0 100 100 0 OK: Always passing
C9 <vendor-specific> 0 100 100 0 OK: Always passing


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Egor
These SMART values do not mean anything sensible to end user (and actually vary for different manufacturers). The errors you were able to recover are usually caused by overheating of a hard drive or because of a defective power supply unit.
Sebastian Mares
The temperature of the unit was always around 35 °C even when stressing. My old WD drive which I now use in an external enclosure used to reach 50 °C when copying large amount of data.

I looked on the Internet and saw that actually a lot of people report problems with Samsung HDDs and for some people, the "Hardware ECC Recovered" figure is higher than mine and raises after hearing some high-pitched noise from the HDD.
TREX6662k6
Also doing a google, some sites say its normal.
Apparently its just a "internal counter" and increases "rapidly" during I\O activity.
The high-pitched noise should be the read\write head jumping about.

HDD Manufactures display the data differently. Some drives dont have this counter.
pepoluan
"Hardware ECC Recovered" -- that has to do with PRML (Partial Response Maximum Likelihood).

To put in a nutshell:

Today's hard disks reach their amazing capacity by cramming A LOT of bits together at higher and higher densities. A "magnetic bit" no longer has well-defined "bit-border", and the magnetic bits are actually overlapping one another. When read, there will be errors, and the ECC corrects them. This is normal with today's hard disks.

Edit: Re-wording.
Sebastian Mares
This is weird since I just connected my WD drive (which I use in an external enclosure) with an IDE cable and had a look at the SMART values - the number for "Hardware ECC Recovered" has only 3 digits. smile.gif
pepoluan
It will *greatly* depend on:
- The actual magnetic bit density
- The amount of I/O performed
- Quality of noise-rejection
molnart
Are you guys sure that those SMART values are reliable ? I had a Maxtor HDD that according to the SMART data had 15 C even after several hours of usage in a room where the temperature was above 20....
Sebastian Mares
It depends on the software and on the HDD manufacturer. There are some standards that apply to SMART (general information such as temperature, raw read error rate, raw write error rate, number of reallocated sectors, etc.) and some fields that each manufacturer can set as it wishes to. If you used a crappy software, maybe it wasn't able to grab the right information (I had the problem that a software was not showing the current temperature, but the lowest temperature indicated by the manufacturer which you also find in the manual for example).
Klyith
QUOTE (molnart @ Nov 29 2006, 15:36) *
Are you guys sure that those SMART values are reliable ? I had a Maxtor HDD that according to the SMART data had 15 C even after several hours of usage in a room where the temperature was above 20....

It could be that HD didn't actually have temperature monitoring, but the software was reading some random value anyways and not reporting correctly. I've seen that happen with other temperature monitoring software.

Or it could just be that the sensor on the drive was poorly calibrated. One the HD they're not really that useful, and I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of sensors wasn't that good.
Sebastian Mares
I think it also depends on the software. Once I had a software that did not read the actual temperature of the drive, but the recommended minimum temperature indicated by the manufacturer.

Actually, several properties are standardized, such as temperature, number of ECC errors recovered, number of reallocated sectors, number of pending reallocatations, etc.
pepoluan
Nice description about SMART:

http://www.almico.com/sfarticle.php?id=2
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