Long SMART test fail...

[BlueMagician]

@joeschmuck - noob question - is there a way to run WDIDLE from within FreeNAS CLI / SSH, or is it strictly a 'stick it on a stick and boot into it' affair?

If it's the latter, from what I've heard, running it won't trash data or annoy FreeNAS when I resume normal service - right?

Again, sincere thanks for your time,

 

[joeschmuck]

WDIdle runs from a DOS bootable disk/Flash drive (my preference), or it's also on the UBCD as well.

Your data is safe when running this program but if your head loading is only a few a day, I wouldn't worry about it. WD increased the lifetime value to 600,000 which is a lot.

 

[Ericloewe]

Not sure how you came to that conclusion, I would expect the drive electronics to just check the temperature, it doesn't mean the drive must access the platters to do this.

Though I haven't bothered to look into it, word on the street is that most HDDs just store their SMART parameters on the disks, instead of NAND on the controller or something, requiring a spinup to read.

 

[joeschmuck]

Though I haven't bothered to look into it, word on the street is that most HDDs just store their SMART parameters on the disks, instead of NAND on the controller or something, requiring a spinup to read.

I am certain all the SMART data is stored on the controller.

Case in point... Lets say you get the infamous drive clicking (head fails to load), but your SMART data is still there to read. This is something a person could check... just remove the drive electronics from a hard drive and plug it in to see if anything shows up. Although I would prefer just disconnecting the drive motor or head armature instead of everything.

Now I haven't checked to see how SSD's do their SMART data storage, they could be different however I don't see why they would reinvent the wheel, well unless it saved a little money.

 

[cyberjock]

I am certain all the SMART data is stored on the controller.

Case in point... Lets say you get the infamous drive clicking (head fails to load), but your SMART data is still there to read. This is something a person could check... just remove the drive electronics from a hard drive and plug it in to see if anything shows up. Although I would prefer just disconnecting the drive motor or head armature instead of everything.

This is not necessarily the case.

I have personally hooked up directly to the disk (removed the controller that is screwed on the outside) and directly wiped out SMART parameters as well as reset logs and other such things using a serial cable directly attached. ;)

Now I cannot vouch that *every* disk out there is like this. But the information I've heard is that the only stuff on the nand is enough to get the disk to spin so that everything else can be read from the disk. Most disks store much (all?) of the upgradable firmware on the disk platters and not on nand that is on the controllers.

BUT, one thing I will share is SMART monitoring lets you choose not to do a SMART checkup every 30 minutes if the disk is spun down. This is because many disks will have to spin up the disk just to get the SMART info, which is a bit counterproductive since you're spinning up the disk just to check SMART (which is stupid if you think about it).

Now whether manufacturers have gotten smarter in the last few years is anyone's guess. Last time I jacked around with a disk directly was in 2013. :D

 

[joeschmuck]

I have personally hooked up directly to the disk (removed the controller that is screwed on the outside) and directly wiped out SMART parameters as well as reset logs and other such things using a serial cable directly attached. ;)

Not sure I follow how you could do this since the motor control is on the controller and is more than just adding a voltage to get it to operate, as well the servo arm which runs in a magnetic field and it's also on the controller so you would never get the heads to load. Of course I'm talking about a modern day hard drive, not one from the days of yesteryear where the heads were controlled by stepper motors. Also not sure what use a serial cable would have been since you would have had to have some electronics to talk to if a serial interface were to really work.

Out of curiosity, how did you know you wiped out the SMART data?

But we both could be right, who knows what each manufacturer does. And I don't mean to come off offensive or anything, just with what I know, it doesn't make sense.

EDIT: Found a reference to a thread (article got deleted) where the author stated that some manufacturers recorded SMART data on a -1 (negative) track thus not interfering with normal hard drive formats, and the other method was recording it on NVM in the PCB. The -1 track makes much more sense to me as I couldn't understand it any other way.