Failed Drive Passes SMART Test After Zeroing. An Illusion?

[abcdelight]

Two days ago I had a drive fail the WD SMART test 5 times. Today I wrote zeros to it and it has passed test three times. The drive is an OEM WD SATA 250 gb.

The drive was a back-up with Windows on it. I hadn't had it in a system for 2 months. Last saturday I swapped drive into a system that was crashing often spontaneously. It turned out my CyberPower surge protector was making system power off . I learned this by hooking up another system working well and it too immediately crashed on the Cyberpower.

Switching surge protectors stopped good systen from crashing while original system not only still crashed but now there were many BSOD's and many error messages. Windows stopped working on original drive and would not accept new installation. The back-up drive was heavily corrupted and there was lots of freezing and crashes and spontaneous shut downs. This is when I tested drive with SMART diagnostic tool and drive failed.

Then I found out the main problem was a malfunctioning stick of memory (surge protector killed it off?). Memtest on one stick exploded with errors in first seconds. Removing stick allowed system to become stable and OS was re-installed and all problems seem abated at this time. I put OS on original malfunctioning drive since the back-up drive had failed tests (it also failed in test on stable system and not just the corrupt one).

Today I wrote zeros to drive getting ready to trash it. After writing zeros I did a quick SMART test again and it passed. It's passed 3 more since. Does the drive pass just because there is no data on it? I don't know exactly wwhat SMART tests with regard to mechanical features verses data corruptions. Did the drive fail just because it was put in unstable system and became very corrupt? It sounded off when I first placed it in crashing system but now it humms along nicely. It's just a $65 OEM drive so I don't care so much if its trash as much as I am curious how these things work. The computer is question is a first assemble that was working ok until this week.

 

[drizzt81]

Run the "Extended test" and see if it passes that.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

If you don't care about it, I'll gladly take it off your hands.

Sorry, couldn't resist there. And as drizzt81 just said, do either the Thorough/Advanced/etc test, whichever the most thorough one that the WD DataLife tools provide for. Usually most drive diagnostic software works on a "Quick" level which takes a few minutes tops to "Advanced" or some other moniker and requires a helluva lot more time.

S.M.A.R.T. keeps tabs on the information the drive generates over its lifetime, like bit errors, CRC errors, temp problems, speed variations, etc. It has a limit for a lot of them that it considers the acceptable amount over the lifetime of said drive; if a situation occurs where the limit is crossed, then the drive will fail S.M.A.R.T. testing and usually you can get that info with either the WD tools or some other S.M.A.R.T. monitoring software.

Hope this helps...

 

[Lazn_Work]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070225-8917.html

SMART is window dressing on individual drives, still somewhat useful for large arrays like what Google uses (multi petabyte) but to the consumer, it is not useful in predicting anything.

 

[abcdelight]

Thanks for replies - I am half way through extended scan now - about an hour.

 

[abcdelight]

It passed so I guess I'll throw it in an enclosure and knock it around a bit. Thanks.