Opened 22 months ago

Last modified 22 months ago

#1625 new defect

smartctl does not check physical element status

Reported by: asomers Owned by:
Priority: minor Milestone: undecided
Component: smartctl Version:
Keywords: scsi Cc:

Description

smartctl -a (with the patch from #1614 applied) reported "SMART Health Status: WARNING - PHYSICAL ELEMENT STATUS CHANGE" for a disk. We removed it from the server, then later reinserted it. This time, smartctl -a reported "SMART Health Status: OK". However, the disk was still damaged, as shown by sg_get_elem_status:

$ sudo sg_get_elem_status --filter=1 --maxlen=1024 /dev/da555
Number of descriptors: 1
Number of descriptors returned: 1
Identifier of element being depopulated: 0

Element descriptors:
[1] identifier: 0x00000e associated LBs: not specified health: outside manufacturer's specification limits <101>

So it seems that resetting an HDD causes its status warning to go away, even though its health is still bad. I don't know if this is a bug in smartctl or in the HDD firmware, but in either case it's unhelpful to the operator. Should smartctl always check physical element status?

This is a Seagate ST16000NM004J HDD.

Change History (1)

comment:1 by Christian Franke, 22 months ago

Keywords: scsi added
Milestone: undecided
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