Sata smart event

[Guest]

At boot time the ich9 usually shows show 2 sata hard drives with “non raidâ€
in green, but recently my data drive shows “smart event†in yellow. I have
since put the drive in a USB enclosure and it is ok. Also when I put it back
to the sata port it showed “smart event†in yellow again. Do I need to reset
something? The drive is only 2 months old.

Thanks Jon
vista home pre dell xps 410 965 intel chipset e6600 2.4 core duo 4 gig ram

 

[Guest]

Jon,

SMART events are part of a Hard Disk 's lifetime diagnostic system. A SMART
event is usually generated because a certain parameter (such as failed reads,
or spin-up time) has passed a threshold amount. Depending on the type of
SMART event it could indicate the start of the end of your drive's life, if
it is a new drive you should be able to claim under waranty.

Most drive manufacturers offer software to diagnose SMART events, and also
reset counters if you so desire. Check your manufacturers website, if you
have no luck, there are third party software programs around that will do the
same, just do a search on your favourite search engine.

Seb.

 

[Guest]

With regards to putting the drive into a USB case. If it's something like a
"Hard Box" which allows you to put SATA drives in there and plug them in
externally via Firewire or USB, you might have to mount the volume in
Computer Managment. I haven't looked at external volumes in Vista but I know
at least in XP you had to mount the volume in Computer Management before it
would appear in Windows Explorer/My Computer.

The drive should show up in Computer Management under the Storage Section.
All you do is right click on the drive and chose to assign a logic mapping to
the volume. This effectively gives the volume a drive letter like D:, X:, J:,
etc.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:21:01 -0700, Andrew McNab

With regards to putting the drive into a USB case. If it's something like a
"Hard Box" which allows you to put SATA drives in there and plug them in
externally via Firewire or USB, you might have to mount the volume in
Computer Managment. I haven't looked at external volumes in Vista but I know
at least in XP you had to mount the volume in Computer Management before it
would appear in Windows Explorer/My Computer.

That hasn't been my experience with two types of generic USB housings
for IDE HDs, as tested with a few different HDs. In these cases, they
have just shown up as drives as soon as XP SP2 detects and generically
drives them, complete with unwanted System Restore activity. These
HDs had sole primary, sole extended(logicals), and
primary+extended(logicals), mainly FATxx, and it's "just worked".

Haven't tested in Vista yet.

Two downsides of external housings:
- heat build-up
- USB or Firewire interface breaks SMART access

These combine to give you HDs that run hotter, and can't be monitored
to watch temperature as that requires SMART access.

So if the HD is S-ATA, I'd consider some sort of native external S-ATA
interface in preference to USB or Firewire.

"Jon" wrote:

If you have concerns about the physical HD, these are best answered
using free HT Tune (www.hdtune.com) or similar. HD Tune ignores
partitions and file systems and just looks at the physical HD without
trying to "fix" anything (tho HD's firmware may make such attempts).

HD Tune needs admin rights to run in Vista, which is a problem when
working from Vista's DVD-booted mOS (Repair, Cmd Prompt). It will
work fine from a Bart boot CDR, derived from XP SP2 or 2003.

When in HD Tune, look at (and ideally, photograph):
- SMART details, esp. reallocated, pending, unrecoverable sectors
- temperature
- start the "slow" surface scan
- watch SMART detail and temperaure while scan in progress

I'd consider any of these as reason to evacuate and replace HD:
- any bad blocks in surface scan
- non-zero raw data values for unrecoverable, pending, reallocated

HDs in external housings seem more prone to failure, even if not
dropped and if swapping in and out is always done safely, and I
suspect temperature is the reason. Below 40C is good.

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The most accurate diagnostic instrument
in medicine is the Retrospectoscope