S.M.A.R.T ((Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) not smart?

[grumpyboy]

Hello there this is my first thread so hi everyone :D
And thanks for taking time to read my post.

Ive heard evidence that S.M.A.R.T
(Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is useless.

It was setup 15 years ago and was resisted by the HDD firms.
So the actual tests done by SMART are not particularly useful.
Also tests have found that SMART produces many false positives,
and it also quite often fails notice anything wrong about drives that do fail.
Whats your experience do you think SMART is useless?
If so how do check the health of your drives?

[unhappy_mage]

Google's paper on the subject found a strong correlation between certain SMART attributes and drive failure. However, they did not find a relationship between failure and SMART. That is, if SMART says the drive is bad, it's probably right, but even if it says it's okay it doesn't mean it won't fail.

[grumpyboy]

thanks for the reply
I read that SMART has a lot of false positives ive had drives with smart failures that have worked fine for years.

the other thing about smart is it doesn't work with usb drives.

Is there some other heath check that is more certain?

[gigabyte1024]

chkdsk and manuf. tests usually found in the support section of the manuf. website.

[unhappy_mage]

The only "certain" health check is to drop the drive off a tall building. Then you know it doesn't work :p

I suggest you read Google's paper (http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf). Some SMART parameters are more important than others:
"Some SMART parameters (scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts, and probational counts) have a large impact on failure probability."