S.M.A.R.T. Diagnostics with Smartontools

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I am running windows and using smartontools. I have a 1Tb Sandisk X400 SSD on SATA and am trying to diagnose some bad block errors. I am new to this tool and need some things cleared up. Firstly, I ran an extended scan with "smartctl -t long /dev/sda" (I assume '/dev/sda' is the correct drive?). I ran this twice, and then did "smartctl -a /dev/sda" to get the results. Here is what I got: pastebin link

I am not sure how to find the number of bad blocks. I am also not sure why many so many attributes appear unknown. I also need to know how often I should be getting bad blocks before failure is imminent. I need to know if I should replace my drive.

Windows 10 x64 (dual booting with Ubuntu)
i7-4710HQ
Sandisk X400 1Tb SSD SD8SB8U1T001122
Nvidia GTX 850m
16Gb DDR3

 

[rkzhao]

Oh nice. I didn't realize you can run smartctl on windows. I thought that was only a linux thing for some reason.

Anyways, it will print out all the attributes that the drive reports. SMART allows a certain set of common attributes and a certain set of vendor unique attributes. Attributes for SATA are identified by their attribute number. If the attribute number is not part of the common list, then it's going to show up as unknown.

smartctl is nice since it prints out pretty much all the information you would get from the SMART command, but it can be a bit overwhelming for the average user, especially when just basic SMART info can be overwhelming.

To simplify it a bit, for your purposes, just look at the raw values for ID#5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct. Right now, it's at zero. It should stay at zero unless the drive is starting to deteriorate. Once this number grows regularly, then the drive is pretty much done for. You're likely going to notice issues with using the drive at that point too.

It's interesting that ID#197 Pending sector count, isn't reported. That's the number of bad sectors that are pending reallocation and goes hand in hand with ID#5. ID#187 Reported_Uncorrectable Errors is also interesting but this generally stays a zero longer than ID#5.

 

[SwapLink]

Oh nice. I didn't realize you can run smartctl on windows. I thought that was only a linux thing for some reason.

Anyways, it will print out all the attributes that the drive reports. SMART allows a certain set of common attributes and a certain set of vendor unique attributes. Attributes for SATA are identified by their attribute number. If the attribute number is not part of the common list, then it's going to show up as unknown.

smartctl is nice since it prints out pretty much all the information you would get from the SMART command, but it can be a bit overwhelming for the average user, especially when just basic SMART info can be overwhelming.

To simplify it a bit, for your purposes, just look at the raw values for ID#5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct. Right now, it's at zero. It should stay at zero unless the drive is starting to deteriorate. Once this number grows regularly, then the drive is pretty much done for. You're likely going to notice issues with using the drive at that point too.

It's interesting that ID#197 Pending sector count, isn't reported. That's the number of bad sectors that are pending reallocation and goes hand in hand with ID#5. ID#187 Reported_Uncorrectable Errors is also interesting but this generally stays a zero longer than ID#5.

Thanks for the reply. So I think I have one or two bad sectors that are not being reallocated. Windows reports in the event viewer that it ran into some bad blocks: "The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block." Also, the task manager occasionally reports that disk usage is at %100 all the time, but it does not show there is a process that is using it and the disk light on my laptop is off. No applications can effectively access the disk during this time. The event viewer shows the bad block errors at the same time as these disk spikes. Furthermore, the spikes are only triggered by certain events, like repairing an application and the spike lingers after the repair is canceled. Also, the Sandisk driver has its own extended SMART test that does not complete (error code 7). So, if it is getting stuck on one or more bad blocks, what would I do to correct a bad block manually?

 

[rkzhao]

Ok, that would normally show up in that "Pending sector count" I mentioned. Again, not sure why smartctl isn't reporting it.

Anyways, to correct a bad bad, you want to write over it. That will either write over any data corruption or the firmware will reallocate the sector.
Easiest way to do that would be with a write zeros erase from something like DBAN.