Question How useful is S.M.A.R.T. really?

[eegad]

I've got a 8 month old Sandisk 1 TB ssd. Works fine, never ran into a problem, until discovering bad sectors during a backup clone operation. Based on that, plus some numbers from S.M.A.R.T. reporting software (crystaldisk, victoria, sandisks own utility), everybody says "the drive is about to fail". However, despite numbers being reported like 1665 bad sectors, or 2038 unrecoverable errors, ALL of the S. M. A. R. T. Utilities list the drive as being "GOOD" with green lights across the board. So what gives? Why a healthy report on a drive that everyone pretty much agrees will "fail soon"? Who to believe....

And a related question... Is there any utility that will do a surface scan and then tell you which files are associated with any bad sectors thatvare found? Or alternately, a utility that will attempt to read every file on a drive and give a report of any files that couldn't be read.

 

[RememberThe5th]

HDTunePro, you have trial and scan the bad blocks it will give you an idea how bad the drive it is.
Also the good thing is always to download manufacturers software to determine your Storage health.
Ive used many those softwares as my HDD is very, very old but still in good shape with no bad blocks tho. Once Crystal and some others reported caution, while HD or HD Sentinel did not.

 

[fzabkar]

The SMART status only becomes bad when any of the attributes falls below its threshold. For example, your drive has 1665 Reallocated Sectors, but it may be that 2500 sectors is the threshold, say.