Other After shredding content of Disk, "unknown" S.M.A.R.T. error disappears

I deleted the contents because the S.M.A.R.T. announced, that the disk will fail. After shredding, the disk is O.K. Strange!
 
A: As olli said, we need WAY more detail. To begin with: Is this a SAS or SATA disk? The SMART implementation of the two interfaces is completely different. And what did the disk say? And what did you do to "shred" the data?

B: Disks are strange. It's quite possible that in normal operation, the disk was getting so many read errors that it was worried about running out of spare space. After a complete overwrite (which allows re-cycling previously unwritten areas), and perhaps a reformat, it might have more space available: overwriting a previously bad (unreadable) area can cause it to have known good content again.

C: If a disk acts strange, I would throw it in the trash and replace it. Disks are cheap. Your time and your peace of mind are expensive.
 
"unkmown error" after running after running 10% of test with gsmartcontrol. SATA samsung disk. It is an external disk that I can connect with USB and eSATA, and the error also appeared with eSATA. Now, the the disk does not react when connecting with USB: perhaps the error lies in the circuits in the case, I will try later to connect it with eSATA.

A small question by the way: can I connect a disk with eSATA with the coimputer on (and running) without damages?
 
A small question by the way: can I connect a disk with eSATA with the coimputer on (and running) without damages?
Yes, I do that all the time with my backup disks. Of course, you should make sure that you unmount all file systems before disconnecting the disk. Also, I recommend to execute camcontrol standby for the disk. This stops (i.e. spin-down) the disk in a controlled way, which is better than forcibly removing power by unplugging it. See the camcontrol(8) manual page for details.
 
"Unknown error" probably doesn't mean that the disk is failing; it probably means that the communication with the disk failed, or that the disk had some strange internal problem. Can you post the output from "smartctl -a /dev/xxx"?

Running smartctl (and friends like gsmartcontrol, which is nothing but a graphical wrapper around it) does work over USB connections too. You have to add "-d sat" to the command line (or perhaps some other similar -d option for other flavors of USB->SATA adapters, read the man page). No idea how to do that in gsmartcontrol, but it will work from the command line.

And completely agree with olli's post regarding disconnecting eSATA disks.
 
Back
Top