Question Monitor HDD health?

[jinchuriki]

Hey, I've set up a linux NAS and I'd like to get daily reports for the HDD health, I'm running a S.M.A.R.T test using smartmontools (https://www.smartmontools.org/) and I'm wondering about a few things...
I was testing just some old 500GB HDD which I won't be using, but it was the perfect thing for my testing, I first checked the disk using crystal disk info, it showed the status as 'good', with most things as 'ok'.

I then tested the same hard drive using smartmontools, there is a short and long test, the short test passed successfully, but the long test failed on the same LBA consistently, I've searched about it and according to most results 'this hard drive is dead and should be replaced'. I then came across this:
https://deadc0de.re/articles/unreadable-sectors.html

I followed the steps there, and after fixing that I ran the long smartmontools test again and it then passed successfully, so I'm extremely confused now.....Is the hard drive ok to use in such case? Since I'll be relying on the smartmontools test, in my point of view, if it passes that means everything is ok, obviously reading each section value is also important to see if something degraded etc, but I'm wondering if this is a good enough way to monitor that?

Thanks.

 

[hotaru.hino]

If it was failing on the same LBA and nothing else, then whatever sector that LBA was pointing to was dead. It's normal for a sector or two on a hard drive to die over time and hard drives come with spare sectors for this reason. If it's working fine now, then it's likely good for a while.

I'd argue unless a few other errors start cropping up on the SMART report, don't worry about it. However, if what you're storing on that drive is reasonably important or unreplaceable, you should have a backup plan in place.

 

[jinchuriki]

If it was failing on the same LBA and nothing else, then whatever sector that LBA was pointing to was dead. It's normal for a sector or two on a hard drive to die over time and hard drives come with spare sectors for this reason. If it's working fine now, then it's likely good for a while.

I'd argue unless a few other errors start cropping up on the SMART report, don't worry about it. However, if what you're storing on that drive is reasonably important or unreplaceable, you should have a backup plan in place.

Thanks for the comment, so yeah I do plan at the moment my backup strategy using a new 2x8TB hard drives on a NAS(as working drive and backup drive), and I'm just trying to understand in which state I should do something. I will probably have 'semi-important' data on the drives, and crucial data will be backed up to a cloud.

I do know that bad sectors is rather common, but I'm trying to understand using the smartmontools(or possibly any other monitoring tool) at which point I should consider replacing one of the drives(or at least order another drive ready for when it fails).

Thanks!

 

[fzabkar]

Are there any reallocated sectors in your latest SMART report?

 

[jinchuriki]

Are there any reallocated sectors in your latest SMART report?

As far as I can see, I think not? Not sure if I miss anything as I'm not familiar with that all that much.
Here is the report:

Thanks.

 

[fzabkar]

There are no reallocated sectors, or sectors pending reallocation. It could be that the bad LBA was retested and found to be good.

The non-zero raw value of the Raw Read Error Rate attribute would suggest that problems are likely in future.

 

[jinchuriki]

There are no reallocated sectors, or sectors pending reallocation. It could be that the bad LBA was retested and found to be good.

The non-zero raw value of the Raw Read Error Rate attribute would suggest that problems are likely in future.

Thanks for your help I really appreciate that....As I said previously, this is just some old HDD that I'm using for testing purposes on how to monitor an HDD, no important data will be stored on it.
Is there some datasheet guideline or something I can follow so I could 'evaluate' my HDD's? Obviously my new HDD's are brand new and in perfect condition, but with time surely some things will degrade, but that still doesn't mean it's in a 'buy new' scenario tho.

Sorry for the extremely picky questions, I know there's no math for stuff like that, a bad drive could fail, and could also work for a few more years, but I'm just trying to make things as best as I can.

 

[fzabkar]

The best you can do is to look for a clean sheet in the SMART report. You can use a tool such as HDDScan to perform a full surface scan. Any "weak" sectors will show up with an increased access time due to read retries.

 

[jinchuriki]

The best you can do is to look for a clean sheet in the SMART report. You can use a tool such as HDDScan to perform a full surface scan. Any "weak" sectors will show up with an increased access time due to read retries.

While I could connect the HDD to my windows machine and run it, I need a CLI solution for my NAS unfortunately.
Thanks a lot for the help either way!