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Understanding SMART Reports

under construction, only slightly usable so far

Disclaimer: this page is based on personal experience gained from examining numerous SMART reports, therefore it should not be considered authoritative. Accuracy however is highly desired, so please feel free to correct it as needed, or suggest corrections or question its statements on the associated Talk page.

Prologue​

There is a lot of ignorance and misinformation out there about SMART reports, so this will be an effort to help users to a better understanding of the content of SMART reports.

Consider the following SMART report extract:

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 112 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 42208416 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 096 096 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 7 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 056 055 030 Pre-fail Always - 25772440425 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 72 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 7 183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 057 048 045 Old_age Always - 43 (Min/Max 36/43) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 19 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 043 052 000 Old_age Always - 43 (0 28 0 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 260348032581703 241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 423266408125 242 Total_LBAs_Read 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 97907054046

Looks rather intimidating, doesn't it, with huge scary numbers! But with a little knowledge from this page, you should be able to quickly say "That drive looks fine! A little warm though!"

Introduction to SMART​

From SMART on Wikipedia, "S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures." It was a laudable effort by the drive manufacturers to provide standard ways to both report current drive parameters and status, and also indicate issues, especially those that might be predictive of imminent drive failure. Unfortunately, the standard had considerable ambiguity, and the various drive engineers have often differed greatly in their interpretations and implementations of both the common attributes, and the introduction of new attributes.

This page is primarily a guide to understanding SMART attributes, in real world usage. They are unfortunately very inconsistent in their behavior, not only between the different attributes, but between the various drive models, and especially between brands. In some cases, the RAW_VALUE is the counter to watch, in others, it is more important to watch what the VALUE does, and there are yet other behaviors too. To understand a particular attribute report line, you have to understand how that SMART attribute is usually handled, keeping in mind who the manufacturer is, and to a lesser extent, what drive model it is. You can try researching it online, but information is really skimpy, nothing authoritative at all from the manufacturers themselves. The table of SMART attributes below should help you understand them, but every manufacturer uses a different set of SMART attributes, even using the common ones in differing ways, even across their own drive models.

There are many computer professionals with a very low opinion of SMART reporting, and they generally discount SMART reports, partly because of all the inconsistency, but also because many drives fail with no SMART warnings at all. I find that once you understand the inconsistencies, and keep some perspective, there is much that can still be learned. For one example, the Seek_Error_Rate (a critical attribute) on Seagate drives generally starts and stays in the mid 50's to high 60's (attribute values generally start at 100 and drop to 1). Not knowing this, you might immediately think there is a serious issue with your new Seagate drive. But now that you do know this, you won't be concerned until it drops into the low 50's or below. The same Seek_Error_Rate value on any other brand would be immediately concerning. Hopefully the table below will help you understand what 'normal' looks like, for the different attributes on different drives by different makers.

SMART report structure​

Each section below includes an example of that section, in a gray box with dotted border. It's just an example, yours may greatly differ.

General information section​

  • Identifying information for the SMART program and the drive - its model, serial number, firmware, capacity/size, time of this report, and SMART support status

    smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [i486-slackware-linux-gnu] (local build)
    Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

    === START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
    Device Model:     ST1500DL003-9VT16L
    Serial Number:    5YD3D71H
    Firmware Version: CC32
    User Capacity:    1,500,301,910,016 bytes
    Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
    ATA Version is:   8
    ATA Standard is:  ATA-8-ACS revision 4
    Local Time is:    Fri Nov 18 16:11:43 2011 EST
    SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
    SMART support is: Enabled

SMART overall health test​

  • Basic overall health test of the drive, only 2 choices - PASSED or FAILED

  • If test result is FAILED, then that means the SMART firmware believes that the drive is in imminent danger of catastrophic failure, so it is imperative to copy off ALL important data. Usually, it is best to copy off the most important files, then the next most important files, then the next, and so on, because the drive may completely quit before you finish copying.

    SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART parameters section​

  • These are generally of little interest to us

  • They do include the recommended polling time for the short and long tests, in other words don't request a SMART report any sooner than this recommendation

  • Unfortunately the original standard must have stipulated using a single byte to store the polling times, which caps their maximum value at 255. That makes the 'Extended self-test' (the long test) polling time of 255 rather useless.

  • I have seen a case where an unusually long 'Total time to complete Offline data collection' for one unusually slow drive was the only indication of a faulty drive. The SMART reports for other drives that were exactly the same model had essentially identical SMART reports, with no issues, except for the difference in this parameter.

    Offline data collection status:  (0x82) Offline data collection activity
                        was completed without error.
                        Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
    Self-test execution status:      (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
                        without error or no self-test has ever
                        been run.
    Total time to complete Offline
    data collection:         ( 623) seconds.
    Offline data collection
    capabilities:            (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                        Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
                        Suspend Offline collection upon new
                        command.
                        Offline surface scan supported.
                        Self-test supported.
                        Conveyance Self-test supported.
                        Selective Self-test supported.
    SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                        power-saving mode.
                        Supports SMART auto save timer.
    Error logging capability:        (0x01) Error logging supported.
                        General Purpose Logging supported.
    Short self-test routine
    recommended polling time:    (   1) minutes.
    Extended self-test routine
    recommended polling time:    ( 255) minutes.
    Conveyance self-test routine
    recommended polling time:    (   2) minutes.

SMART attributes section​

  • This is the table of SMART attributes for this drive. The columns are described below the example. Yours may greatly differ from this example, as some drives report more attributes, and some drives report considerably fewer. The newest drives often introduce new attributes.

    SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
    Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
    ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
      1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   111   100   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       32796080
      3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   095   095   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
      4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       5
      5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
      7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   100   253   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       265367
      9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       19
     10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
     12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       5
    183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
    187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   070   069   045    Old_age   Always       -       30 (Lifetime Min/Max 26/31)
    191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       4
    193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       5
    194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   030   040   000    Old_age   Always       -       30 (0 26 0 0)
    195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   037   029   000    Old_age   Always       -       32796080
    197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
    199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
    240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       172868138696723
    241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       2919100768
    242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       572998840

  • Column 1 is the attribute number, usually a decimal number between 1 and 255. Some SMART tools report it in hex, from 01 to FF. These are relatively standard ID's, except that different manufacturers will occasionally introduce a new one, unused by anyone else. Generally, the only ones you can count on seeing are: 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 187, 190 or 194, 193, 195, 197, 198, and 199.

  • Column 2 is the relatively standardized attribute name. There are a few that seem only used by a single manufacturer.

  • Column 3 is the attribute handling flag, of no interest to us - ignore it.

  • Column 4 is the VALUE, one of the most important values in the table. It is stored in a single byte on the drive for each SMART attribute, so its range is from 0 to 255.

    • However, the values of 0, 254, and 255 are reserved for internal use, so you never see them.
    • The value of 253 usually always means "Not Used Yet", so when you see it, you are probably looking at a brand new drive. Sometimes though, there can be a few attributes that take awhile before they are used, so may stay 253 for longer.
    • VALUE is almost always used as a normalized scale of perfectly good to perfectly bad, usually starting at VALUE=100, then dropping toward a worst case of VALUE=1. You can generally think of it as representing a scale starting at 100% good, then slowly dropping until failure at some predetermined percentage number, in the THRESHOLD column.
    • Someone realized that if the values only run from 100 to 1, then they are wasting the possible values from 101 to 252, so some SMART programmers have decided to stretch the scale for certain attributes to start at 200 instead of 100, providing twice the data points. Unfortunately, which attributes are scaled from 200 to 1 is completely inconsistent, with almost all SMART reports showing some attributes starting at 100, and other attributes starting at 200. In addition, there are a few Maxtor and Samsung drives that took the start of the scale all the way to 252 or 253! Above, you see all but 1 attribute using 100, the exception being attribute 199 which starts at 200. In general, you can think of 200-type scales as 100 times 2 (just divide the number by 2), and from now on, that is what we are going to do in most of the discussion.
    • The temperature attributes 190 and 194 are exceptions to the scaling. They are either temperatures or forms of the temperature, and they don't scale (their WORST value may look like it scales though).
    • The error rate attributes 1 and 7 are also exceptions, although of a different kind. Raw read and seek errors are a natural part of normal operation, so even in a brand new and perfect drive, there is a factory-determined optimal rate of read and seek errors. They are nothing to worry about, they're the natural result of temperature expansion and other things, and they are used to help the drive constantly recalibrate itself. But because these error rates are non-zero, you essentially cannot have a perfect error rate of zero that you declare is a VALUE of 100. So manufacturers determine what an optimal error rate should be and call it 100. But often, drives may achieve an error rate (especially when they are new) that is even better than the optimal one set by the manufacturer, which results in an error rate that is HIGHER than 100! For an example, see the VALUE above of attribute 1, the Raw_Read_Error_Rate. It's as if the drive is performing at 111%!

  • Column 5 is WORST, the lowest VALUE ever recorded (except for a few unusual and uncommon cases).

    • [incomplete]

  • Column 6 is THRESH, the manufacturer determined lowest value that WORST should be allowed to fall to, before reporting it as a FAILED quantity. Some are counters, some are informational such as temperature or hours used or

    • [incomplete]

  • Column 7 is TYPE, the type of attribute. It can either be Pre-fail or Old_age.

    • If it is Pre-fail, then the attribute is considered a critical attribute, one that participates in the overall SMART health assessment (PASSED/FAILED) of the drive. If the value of WORST falls below THRESH, then the drive FAILS the overall SMART health test, and complete failure may be imminent. The Pre-fail term means that if this attribute fails, then the drive is considered 'about to fail'.
    • If it is Old_age, then the attribute is considered (for SMART purposes) a noncritical attribute, one that does not fail the drive. The Old_age term means that the attribute is related to normal aging, normal wear and tear of the drive.
    • When new attributes are introduced, they may seem like a critical item, perhaps even with an appropriate THRESH set. But if they are marked as Old_age, then they do NOT fail the drive, even if WORST falls below THRESH. Naturally, this could be highly concerning, but there is no authoritative interpretation available, so no definitive conclusions can be made. These attributes should be considered Experimental.
    • [incomplete]

  • Column 8 is UPDATED. Supposedly, this is an indicator when the attribute is updated, Always or Offline. If Always, then it is assumed that the attribute is updated whenever a relevant event occurs. In other words, it is always 'live'. If Offline, then supposedly the attribute is only updated when offline tests are being performed. But in real life, our experience is that these are inaccurate. Just look at the example above, at attributes 241 and 242. They appear to be live counters of LBA's read and written, yet the test section of that particular SMART report indicates that there have been no offline tests performed!

  • Column 9 is WHEN_FAILED, usually and thankfully blank! If not blank, then it indicates the last operational hour (from attribute 9 Power_On_Hours) that this attribute failed!

  • Column 10 is RAW_VALUE, a manufacturer controlled raw number, which may or may not be of interest to us. From now on, we will often shorten its name and refer to it only as 'the RAW'.

    • [incomplete]

Error Log section​

  • [incomplete]

    SMART Error Log Version: 1
    No Errors Logged

  • [incomplete, need example with errors]

Test results section​

  • [incomplete]

    SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
    No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

    SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
     SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
        1        0        0  Not_testing
        2        0        0  Not_testing
        3        0        0  Not_testing
        4        0        0  Not_testing
        5        0        0  Not_testing
    Selective self-test flags (0x0):
      After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
    If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

  • [incomplete, need example with tests]

Table of attributes​

For a fuller description of each attribute, please see Known ATA S.M.A.R.T. attributes on Wikipedia. [incomplete]

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate​

  • This is an indicator of the current rate of errors of the low level physical sector read operations. In normal operation, there are ALWAYS a small number of errors when attempting to read sectors, but as long as the number remains small, there is NO issue with the drive. Error correction information and retry mechanisms are in place to catch and fix these errors. Manufacturers therefore determine an optimal level of errors for each drive model, and set up an appropriate scale for monitoring the current error rate. For example, if 3 errors per 1000 read operations seems near perfect to the manufacturer, then an error rate of 3 per 1000 ops might be set to an attribute VALUE of 100. If the rate increased to 10 per 1000, then the rate might be scaled to 80 (completely under manufacturer control, and NEVER revealed or explained to us!).
  • They are called Raw Reads to distinguish them from the more common term 'read errors', which represent a much higher level read operation. What we usually refer to as a 'read error' is an error returned by a read process, that has attempted a series of one or more seeks and raw reads, plus optional error corrections and retries. It either returns an indicator of total success plus the sector data (considered to be in perfect shape), or it returns an error code, and no sector data.
  • PLEASE completely ignore the RAW_VALUE number! Only Seagates report the raw value, which yes, does appear to be the number of raw read errors, but should be ignored, completely. All other drives have raw read errors too, but do not report them, leaving this value as zero only. To repeat, Seagates are not worse than other drives because they appear to have raw read errors, rather they are the only one to report the number. I suspect that others do not report the number to avoid a lot of confusion, and questions for their tech support people. Seagate leaves those of us who provide tech support the job of answering the constant questions about this number. Hopefully now that you understand this, you will never bother a kind IT person with questions about the Raw_Read_Error_Rate RAW_VALUE again?
  • [incomplete?]
  • Critical attribute - if its WORST falls below its THRESH, then the drive will be considered FAILED

3 Spin_Up_Time​

  • [incomplete]

4 Start_Stop_Count​

  • [incomplete]

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct​

  • [incomplete]

7 Seek_Error_Rate​

  • [incomplete]

9 Power_On_Hours​

  • [incomplete]

[the most important part of this whole page is completely incomplete!]

Additional info​