[smartmontools-support] Reports Health Status OK? But No SMART Support Available?

[Claudio Kuenzler]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 7:36 AM Schorschi Decker <schorschi at dc.rr.com>
wrote:

> I asked the question... because nothing typically reported was reported.
> Not even status determined by attribute scan.  This is the first time I
> have ever seen SmartMonTools not report results in sufficient detail to be
> clear on how the result was achieved, hence the question.
>

Fair question. The smartctl output might look weird when you're used to ATA
devices and their SMART attributes. But if you've worked with SCSI disks a
while ago, this is kind of normal behaviour.
How exactly the Health of the drive is assessed, I can't tell you. But the
health status (mostly) works. See
https://www.claudiokuenzler.com/blog/411/check_smart-saves-server-lifes-defect-hard-drive-detected
for such a case. You can also see the "Elements in grown defect list" on
this article as these were all SCSI drives.

Moreover, the comment 'Never assume 100% accuracy on the reported data
> though' is what?  Is that a blanket disclaimer or a comment specific to IDE
> device status determination?
>
That is a general disclaimer :-). The data retrieved and shown by SMART
should be used as helpful indicator. But never fully rely on it. A disk not
indicating any errors in any attribute can still fail out of the blue.
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