First of all, I think everyone knows that hard drives fail a lot more than the manufacturers would like to admit. Google did a study that indicates that certain raw data attributes that the S.M.A.R.T status of hard drives reports can have a strong correlation with the future failure of the drive.

We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in re- allocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabil- ities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever.

Seagate seems like it is trying to obscure this information about their drives by claiming that only their software can accurately determine the accurate status of their drive and by the way their software will not tell you the raw data values for the S.M.A.R.T attributes. Western digital has made no such claim to my knowledge but their status reporting tool does not appear to report raw data values either.

I've been using HDtune and smartctl from smartmontools in order to gather the raw data values for each attribute. I've found that indeed... I am comparing apples to oranges when it comes to certain attributes. I've found for example that most Seagate drives will report that they have many millions of read errors while western digital 99% of the time shows 0 for read errors. I've also found that Seagate will report many millions of seek errors while Western Digital always seems to report 0.

Now for my question. How do I normalize this data? Is Seagate producing millions of errors while Western digital is producing none? Wikipedia's article on S.M.A.R.T status says that manufacturers have different ways of reporting this data.

Here is my hypothesis:

I think I found a way to normalize (is that the right term?) the data.

Seagate drives have an additional attribute that Western Digital drives do not have (Hardware ECC Recovered). When you subtract the Read error count from the ECC Recovered count, you'll probably end up with 0. This seems to be equivalent to Western Digitals reported "Read Error" count. This means that Western Digital only reports read errors that it cannot correct while Seagate counts up all read errors and tells you how many of those it was able to fix.

I had a Seagate drive where the ECC Recovered count was less than the Read error count and I noticed that many of my files were becoming corrupt. This is how I came up with my hypothesis. The millions of seek errors that Seagate produces are still a mystery to me.

Please confirm or correct my hypothesis if you have additional information.

Here is the smart status of my western digital drive just so you can see what I'm talking about:

james@ubuntu:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     WDC WD1001FALS-00E3A0
Serial Number:    WD-WCATR0258512
Firmware Version: 05.01D05
User Capacity:    1,000,204,886,016 bytes
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   8
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Thu Jun 10 19:52:28 2010 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   179   175   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       4033
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       270
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       1468
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       262
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       46
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       223
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   105   102   000    Old_age   Always       -       42
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0