Hard Drive Monitoring Programs

[Phil8659]

As of yet, the ability to use information stored about hard drive events is not up to the data itself.

For example. I put Sentinel on my T3400 running a Mediasonic 8 bay.

Right away, on the system with 14 drives, 2 of them are flagged as critically failing. This was deduced from the smart data. The program computes the data per the ability of the programmer, The program says these drives are about to fail. I have, myself, viewed their smart report over the years using a different program. I knew what it said.

Now, how did these two drives get that data in SMART?

Well, the two drives in question were once part of an array I used constantly, a 5 drive array. One day, the array crashed unexpectedly, not because of any drive in it, but because the fan monitoring circuit went out on the box and it overheated, locked up the drives. I shut it off right away. A while later I decided to bring the box back on line. How to do that with a bad temp circuit? I simply plugged the fan into a non regulated power source, same plug type on the board, which means the fans always run without regulation and the box stays cool.
Now, two drives ended up in the red for temp, failed start up attempts, and reallocated sectors, because the drive panicked. These values have been the same for years. Every other metric in Smart is good. They have not changed in at least a decade.
However good a monitoring system is, it cannot manage facts it cannot gather. The box that failed still runs today, without problem.

Just because a thing went through hell, does not mean it was actually damaged. The drives run great.

But, i trust that the SMART circuits will actually, and radically improve over the years, after all, today they are putting regulators into AA and AAA batteries.

The facts are, a drive that survives that much stress, and recovers to run perfectly, is probably better than drives which would never have survived at all. These 2 drives are Hitachi, and I have rarely seen one fail.

The T3400 actually has 6 native sata ports. I use them all.

[Phil8659]

Dell Ebt2250 , I might get me one of those for my birthday.

I just tossed a 2tb WD drive in the garbage, it had a perfect SMART readout. I tossed it because it could not even reach a file transfer rate of 40mbs.
That is a junk drive. Took about 12 hours or so to copy it.