Wednesday, December 2, 2015

S.M.A.R.T. Reports Failing Hard Drive, Can it be a Motherboard Issue?


I recently made a return under warranty for a hard drive that was reporting over 1000 reallocated sectors, over 100 pending sectors, and 2 uncorrectable sectors. During the chat session with their employee, he wanted me to do run a diagnostic to see if the motherboard was at fault.


Is it possible that the motherboard was failing and not the hard drive in this case? Can S.M.A.R.T. data (which I believe is stored on the hard drive) be misread or misinterpreted by the motherboard?


Answer



No. SMART attributes are completely managed by the disk itself.


While software used for reading these attributes might interpret them incorrectly, there’s nothing to interpret about your values. The disk was toast and the motherboard isn’t the culprit.


What a defective motherboard might cause is (more or less) silent data corruption. When this happens the data that reaches the disk is already corrupted. The disk doesn’t know that, naturally, and stores it like any other data. Errors like that will not be caught by SMART, but (hopefully) your operating system.


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