What does Current, Worst, Threshhold Actually Mean?

Hi Toshimi,

My name is Igor, it's a pleasure for me to help others and I'll do all my best to help you.

Current is a current value, worst is the worst value in the drive's history, threshold is a minimal acceptable value.

> Why Current is greater than Worst

This means the current value is better than the same parameter some time ago.

> Current and Worst are larger than Threshhold?

This means the values are good. if the values will be worse than threshold, it will be bad.

There are several articles that discuss S.M.R.T. They state that detais are different among manufactures and are not disclosed.

***

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/simple-questions-what-smart-what-does-it-do/

Know that, apart from some singular attempts (Google,Backblaze), most of the S.M.A.R.T. data is undocumented. The system provides a great deal of internal data. Still, there are many inconsistencies in the statistics because many of the hard drive manufacturers use different definitions and measurements. For example, some manufacturers store power on-time data as hours, while others measure it in minutes or seconds. Also, they don't explain which of the various attributes or variables are worth our attention, making us drown in data.

*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology Many motherboards display a warning message when a disk drive is approaching failure. Although an industry standard exists among most major hard drive manufacturers,^[^issues remain due to attributes intentionally left undocumented to the public in order to differentiate models between manufacturers.^[^^^From a legal perspective, the term "S.M.A.R.T." refers only to a signaling method between internal disk drive electromechanical sensors and the host computer. Because of this the specifications of S.M.A.R.T. are entirely vendor specific and, while many of these attributes have been standardized between drive vendors, others remain vendor-specific. S.M.A.R.T. implementations still differ and in some cases may lack "common" or expected features such as a temperature sensor or only include a few select attributes while still allowing the manufacturer to advertise the product as "S.M.A.R.T. compatible.

***

https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/my-system-reported-a-smart-error-on-the-drive-184619en/

The system will report an error when a S.M.A.R.T. threshold has been met.  The drive monitors several kinds of performance areas.  A few of these areas include read retries (meaning data wasn't read correctly the first time), slow spin up, high temperature, and excessive bad sector.  The specifics of these thresholds are not made publicly available and can differ between designs. Different drive manufacturers will have different S.M.A.R.T. specifications and thresholds as well. A system S.M.A.R.T. error means you should backup your data as soon as possible and maintain consistent backups. 

***

>> Current and Worst are larger than Threshhold?
> This means the values are good. if the values will be worse than threshold, it will be bad.

Item 05 Reallocated Sectors Count has Caution mark and S.M.R.T values are

Current = 100, Worst = 100, Threshhold = 0

Thes numbers look like scores and not like actual number of reallocated sectors.

However Current of item 01 is 117 which is greater than 100.

> Then what do Current = 100, Worst = 100, Threshold= 36 mean?

Current 100 means there is no bad sectors right now. 36 is a value defined by manufacturer.

If there is a scratch or some other damage on the plates, many re-read attempts during chkdsk /r command may increase this damage and even cause head damage.

> Does this mean that no problems were found?

This may mean there were no NEW bad sectors found.

Thank you for useful information.

I checked the output of CrystalDiskon two computers.

The first compute has three disks. The first disk on this computer is ST3250AS 250GB. The 2nd an 3rd computers are ST500 M002 500GB.

The SMART values for these 3 disks are identical.
For 05, Current = 100, Worst = 100, Threshold= 36,

Raw Value = 0.
For C5, Current = 100, Worst = 100, Threshold= 30,

Raw Value = 0.

According to CrystalDiskon each of these disks are in Good condition, although each of them failed a few times. Therefore I run chkdsk <disk-partition-ID:> /r ofen.

Continue for 2nd computer

05 attribute raw value shows the exact (actual) number or reallocated (replaced) sectors. C5 attribute raw value shows the actual number or problem sectors that are not replaced yet.