Revision as of 12:38, 13 July 2012

Hardware

Hard drive failure falls into 2 categories: predictable and unpredictable. Predictable failure is usually caused by normal wear on the mechanical parts of the drive. Unpredictable failure can be caused by misuse, defective parts, or immediate mechanical failure.

Gradual wear causes most mechanical failures. The most common symptoms of a failing hard drive are:

• Increased heat output
• Increased noise level
• Problems with reading or writing data

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) scans

SMART scans are a quick way to tell if a hard drive is failing, although not all failing drives fail SMART tests. There is no standard requirement for SMART support, so not all disks will test all or even most of the tests available.

While the eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level, problems with reading and writing of data, or an increase in the number of damaged disk sectors.

You can test most hard drive formats via Ubuntu's built in SMART scan (in Disk Utility). Or try GSMARTControl.

Common SMART signs of HDD failure:

• Read error rate
• Reallocated sector counts
• Spin retry count
• Command timeout
• Reallocation event count
• Current pending sector count
• Uncorrectable sectory count
• Drive life protection status

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