Is my hard drive failing?
I'm beginning to worry about my ~3yr old WD Green drive. In the last few days i've noticed that my media player is acting weird, it won't move to the next track after a song has finished and also won't play new songs when I double click.
So, I downloaded the "smartmontools" package and used "sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb2" to check out the drive. Here is a snapshot of the output:
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 164 163 021 Pre-fail Always - 6758
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1353
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 092 092 000 Old_age Always - 5846
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1201
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 61
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1353
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 124 112 000 Old_age Always - 26
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 198 000 Old_age Always - 3311
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0
I'm worried most about the "Pre-fail" rows.. does this mean that the drive could fail at any time or what?
If you read the column headers, you'd see that pre-fail is the type of statistic that's collected not the status. The When_Failed column being empty should also give you some hints about whether or not anything has failed (nothing has).
When in doubt, read the manpage or look for documentation on your problem.
Each Attribute also has a Threshold value (whose range is 0 to 255) which is printed under the heading "THRESH". If the Normalized value is less than or equal to the Threshold value, then the Attribute is said to have failed. If the Attribute is a pre-failure Attribute, then disk failure is imminent.
So as long as the normalized value is higher than the thresshold value there's nothing to worry about.
Source: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/man/smartctl.8.html
Your hard disks seems fine. No reallocated sectors, no other failed columns. To be sure. try to do a fsck and a hard disk self test: smartctl -t long /dev/sdb
- this one will take some hours. You will be able to read the results using the same command you used above.
Smart is per disk, not per volume, so pass the drive, not the volume (though smartctl seems to be clever enough to find your disk anyhow).