Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

S.M.A.R.T.

The S.M.A.R.T. status of one of my hard disk drives is "bad". What should I do now?

A "bad" S.M.A.R.T. status commonly indicates a high probability of an upcoming drive failure or data loss. It is strongly recommended that you immediately save all important data from the affected volumes and replace the drive as soon as possible. After your data is backed up, you might want to run scandisk with thorough surface testing. See if you still have warranty claims on the hard disk drive. You might also want to inspect the S.M.A.R.T. attributes of the drive and read the tooltip explanation of the attribute name.

Some S.M.A.R.T. attribute values of my brand new HDD vary extremely, but still remain over their thresholds most of the time. Should I be concerned?

Use the new HDD a few weeks and see whether the variation diminishes. In most cases, the attribute variation normalizes within the first month.

Why does not Hard drive Inspector detect my disks connected to an integrated or external RAID controller?

There's no way to get S.M.A.R.T. information from the hard drives connected to RAID controller, because they work via RAID BIOS. So Hard Drive Inspector doesn't have direct access to them.

Some S.M.A.R.T. attribute thresholds are 0. What is this for?

The manufacturer of the HDD sets the threshold of S.M.A.R.T. attributes to be 0, in order to indicate that those attributes are non-crucial to the drive health status; those attributes can't have a "life critical" flag. Read more about that in "S.M.A.R.T. Technology".

The "Power on hours count" attribute seems to display an invalid raw value.

While the S.M.A.R.T. standard implies that the power on hours count raw value should contain hours, some manufacturers report minutes, half minutes or even seconds instead.

Some raw attribute values seem to be completely wrong.

The interpretation of raw S.M.A.R.T. attributes values is not easy, because the ATA/ATAPI specifications do not bind the manufacturers to a specific raw data format. Some manufacturers use a rather proprietary format to store raw data, and that makes a general approach of interpreting the raw data relatively difficult.

Some attribute are named "[unknown attribute]".

The HDD reports the IDs of the S.M.A.R.T. attributes only, but not its descriptive name. Since some manufacturers use proprietary attributes and keep information about the attribute meaning secret, some attributes might be untranslatable for the present moment. In particular, there are many Maxtor attributes completely unknown by now.