Windows 10: How smart is SMART now?

Hi there

a few years ago is a geological age ago in computer technology. Today's SSD's outlast spinners in every way these days and are more reliable too. Long since GONE are the ist gen SSD's which DID have problems and limited read / write cycles.

The cost per byte is also falling rapidly -- a 1TB SSD is now extremely reasonably priced - Ideal for a laptop where you want to run one or two VM's and have a decent level of storage.

I run 4 VMs concurrently in a laptop with a 1 TB SSD - one of the VM's is a W7 with a SAP IDES test system installed -- not the lightest load on a system. It runs absolutely fine on the SSD as a VM with decent response time. Concurrently I also have a W8.1, an XP system and a W10 system. Totally impossible to run these concurrently decently with a spinner in a laptop. Laptop is HP envy sleekbook, 8 GB RAM with a decent 15 processor.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Agreed, I was pointing out that there are quite a few of those older SSD for sale, to an unsuspecting public.

 

There's no doubt that SSDs are going ti be as mainstream as HDDs are now in couple of years. I remember paying 500 bucks for a 40MB, MFM hard drive. Time when we thought that HDDs are not going to make it because of CDs. you could stick 5 or more HDD's data on one CD at that time.
There's few things that keep mechanical drives still alive and relatively cheap. One is huge number of them still used in data farms and relatively many of them are replaced on regular basis. In that may lay a cause of many HDDs are of inferior state, heard rumors that many of those replaced drives are refurbished and sold as new in some countries. There's no way to see if a HDD came from a data farm, they are mounted in silicon rubber mounts, no scratches on them and by simple change of firmware SMART is brought in new state and any surface bad blocks can be masked to hidden space. That is done even with brand new drives, even brand new ones have some damage and unreadable spots.
Once upon a time, list of bad sectors were printed on the sticker on each drive. When IDE drives came out, with own FW and BIOS on the drive board, it is simple to bypass bad spots so they don't appear anywhere.

 

That sounds like a good thing for us old people and to think I have replaced all my HDD. LOL

 

Did I understand correctly.

If the SMART tells you your hard drive is good it's a maybe.
If SMART tells you your hard drive is bad replace it.

 

It's "maybe" in both cases. In second case there could be some exemptions. SMART remembers everything that ever happens to drive, Let's take one condition, your data cable was in bad shape or contacts are not good, it gets few bad sectors, you fix cable and everything starts working good again but bad sectors were marked, bypassed and data sent to spare area. Your SMART health is down to let's say 50% but the drive itself is sill good. In cases like that if no new bad sectors appear, you're still good to go. Same goes for software caused bad sectors, like when power goes out during writing. Bad sectors like that are marked by OS and bypassed but data in them is not valid. Lo level format or safety erase, when zeroes are written to whole disk, can fix that. I have couple of old, formerly abused HDDs, with SMART down to 10% still working fine.

 

I'm talking high volumes: 2TB and 4TB (I'm not buying anymore HDDs smaller than 4TB now). For now, for that much storage, spinners are still the most cost effective. I am using an SSD for the boot drive in my desktop machine and 500GB SSDs for boot and storage in my little one drive notebooks.


I did see an article recently (MaximumPC) that said we could be seeing SSDs breaking the 1TB barrier soon due to the new 3D technology. According to the article, Intel is claiming we could be seeing 10TB SSDs in as little as two years. *Shock I'm not holding my breath but I am certainly looking forward to something like that! Just think; replacing heavy, bulky 3.5" drives with lightweight, compact 2.5" drives. I could replace the three 3.5" storage HDDs in my computer and the twelve 3.5" HDDs I use for backups with five 2.5" SSDs and gain an extra 2TB of storage! Much smaller, lighter computer cases can be used (extremely welcome ant my age!) and far less space will be needed to store backup drives.

Since I'm not planning on leaving Win 7 anytime soon (it's working just fine for me and I don't upgrade anything until I really need to; this is not to put down Win 10), Storages Spaces will not be available to me for a while.

Drives of any kind can fail without warning, no matter what one is using, so there is no point in worrying about getting a warning (I do check SMART about once a month but I don't depend on it). The only protection for that is a solid backup scheme. Mirroring will only protect from drive failure (to a degree). Data can also be lost due to other hardware failure (PSU shorting out), theft, natural disasters, user error (accidental, deletion, dropping a drive, etc.) malware, etc. no form of RAID will protect from any of those.

 

It's "maybe" in both cases. In second case there could be some exemptions. SMART remembers everything that ever happens to drive, Let's take one condition, your data cable was in bad shape or contacts are not good, it gets few bad sectors, you fix cable and everything starts working good again but bad sectors were marked, bypassed and data sent to spare area. Your SMART health is down to let's say 50% but the drive itself is sill good. In cases like that if no new bad sectors appear, you're still good to go. Same goes for software caused bad sectors, like when power goes out during writing. Bad sectors like that are marked by OS and bypassed but data in them is not valid. Lo level format or safety erase, when zeroes are written to whole disk, can fix that. I have couple of old, formerly abused HDDs, with SMART down to 10% still working fine. If a drive is throwing SMART errors, no matter the cause, if it's still under warranty, most manufacturers will replace it under warranty. You would have to be nuts not to take them up on it, even if what you get back is a recertified or refurbished drive.