Has Windows' S.M.A.R.T. features ever saved you from a failing drive?

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious. A few months back, I replaced a HDD for a neighbor that was running Win7. Her PC was several years old, and Win7 when booting and running, popped up a screen, kind of like "Your HDD is about to die!!!". Well, maybe with less exclaimation marks, and not worded exactly like that.

My first reaction, when said neighbor told me about it, before I had a chance to see it for myself, was that they had systray malware, the kind that constantly nags, "You have a virus, click here to scan for viruses". After which, and they "scan", then they want a CC# to remove them.

But no, this was a legit Windows 7 SMART subsystem disk replacement / imminent failure warning. It prompted to do a System Image backup, of which I did so, then put in a new HDD and restored the backup, and they were good to go. It took like three hours.

 

[Elixer]

Can't say I ever noticed Windows do that...
However, I run CrystalDiskInfo on startup, and I wish THAT was built into Windows.

 

[corkyg]

No

 

[tcsenter]

I don't think W7 has code to intepret SMART data or provide notification, not even in Event Viewer (other than logging bad disk sectors, controller errors).

 

[cbn]

I don't think W7 has code to intepret SMART data or provide notification, not even in Event Viewer (other than logging bad disk sectors, controller errors).

This is probably what happened.

 

[Johnny Lucky]

Hiya Larry!

Bought my first hard drive way back in 1985. Been upgrading ever since. Never had a hard disk go bad on me. They don't call me lucky for nothing.

Almost as good with mainstream customers. Only had two customers with problems. Both were young people that managed to fill their drives to capacity. Just a matter of cleaning out all the useless junk files.

For the past 2 years I have not installed any hard disk drives. Customers wanted ssd's.

 

[lxskllr]

Only had one drive die on a personal machine, and I got no warning. It quit working right, so I backed up what I could. This was on Vista. There may have been SMART errors, but I didn't want to dedicate drive access to finding out.

From what I've read around, SMART doesn't always work, but when it indicates a problem, you have a problem. IOW, you may get a false negative. but never a false positive.

 

[PliotronX]

Can't say I ever noticed Windows do that...
However, I run CrystalDiskInfo on startup, and I wish THAT was built into Windows.

Has a pretty sweet email alert function as well. It was very useful for key workstations before getting an MSP centric monitoring platform in place (Ncentral).

I've never had windows produce a useful alert because what causes problems silently are pending sectors which get hung up because the drive wants to test those sectors and remap them if they are truly bad but if the sectors are in use, it has trouble doing so. This takes manual inspection with tools to look at the parameters.

 

[jhansman]

Win7 once alerted me to a spinner that was going south. Backed it up, and sure enough the thing died within a week. I wonder how well these utils work with SSDs? Has anyone had Samsung's Magician tip them to a pending failure? I don't run it at bootup, but every month or so to keep an eye on my drives.

 

[PliotronX]

Win7 once alerted me to a spinner that was going south. Backed it up, and sure enough the thing died within a week. I wonder how well these utils work with SSDs? Has anyone had Samsung's Magician tip them to a pending failure? I don't run it at bootup, but every month or so to keep an eye on my drives.

That is cool that it works sometimes, definitely a head above XP just popping up balloons about delayed write failures that may or may not be software rooted.

The only smart attributes to pay attention to on SSDs really are wear leveling and TBW (closely related). Outright failures are nearly 100% unpredictable with flash media, its almost binary. Their failures tend to be normal operation one day and the next, the system can't detect it. This is why I do not keep anything critical on flash media.

 

[Shmee]

I may have seen that before. I usually use parted magic or HDtune though.

 

[dtgoodwin]

I've never had Windows report a SMART error, but I have replaced 4 drives in my NAS in the past 10 years. Fortunately, I have never lost a drive to an unexpected failure.

 

[Ranulf]

Never had that happen in windows. For me it has been a drive will start with random crashes/blue screens, data corruption or the drive itself is making noises. Maxtor may have made bad drives but it taught me what to look for.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I've seen the screen popup/systray popup before, on a system with a known bad SATA drive I was exfiltrating data from for a while. Seemed like Windows doing it's job in that regard. I've also had them go tail-up with nary a warning as well though so I imagine it depends on the failure mode.

 

[Topweasel]

I have only had three HDD's die on me. All Seagate 3TB drives (I know right). Anyways on two of them I noticed trouble accessing different folders and such. Got replacement drives and moved the data off them (this was very time consuming, since any access with any tool or software to the affected data spots would lock the system). The third I noticed the access issues too late and only got about a third of the non-affected data off before it took a crap.

None of them gave up any SMART warnings.