How accurate is S.M.A.R.T. for hard drives?

[Yankee666666]

Hello,

Has anyone ever been saved from a HDD failure from a SMART warning?

 

[sminlal]

Google's study on disk reliability indicates that there is a fairly strong correlation between some types of errors reported by SMART and increased likelihood of failure. The issue is that the likelihood of failure is still less than 50% - for example the average drive that reports a scan error is still 70% likely to keep working just fine for at least the next 8 months. So you're faced with the question of whether or not to replace a drive that ~probably~ won't fail.

 

[Shadow703793]

Yes. I have been saved 2x with SMART warnings with some old Maxtor drives. Granted, I do have a very good back up system and these drives didn't have anything important, but nevertheless I was able to avoid down time by ordering some new HDDs before they completely failed.

 

[jsc]

Even keeping in mind what sminlal said, I, like Shado,w would not ignore a SMART warning.

Ignoring a SMART warning is worse than trusting your data to a backup system that you knew was 70% reliable.