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I've been watching a SMART enabled HDD closely recently (connected to an OSX Server, which is not very helpful with SMART output out of the box).

The drive is definitely failing- the heads click, SMART tests fail (despite SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED), etc and I have a replacement which will be DD'ing across as you read this.

I just had a question about the SMART output please (not whether the drive is failing!). The Remaining percentage below is the amount of the test remaining after the first error was found.

The question is- does the SMART test continue after the error is found? If not, does anyone please know if there is a way to force it to complete and test the entire drive?

Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining    LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
 # 1  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       80%     18302         406986

Thanks for your time!

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1 Answers1

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No, the test does not continue after the first bad sector is detected.

From smartctl man page:

selftest - [ATA] prints the SMART self-test log. The disk maintains a self-test log showing the results of the self tests, which can be run using the '-t' option described below. For each of the most recent twenty-one self-tests, the log shows the type of test (short or extended, off-line or captive) and the final status of the test. If the test did not complete successfully, then the percentage of the test remaining is shown. The time at which the test took place, measured in hours of disk lifetime, is also printed. [Note: this time stamp wraps after 2^16 hours, or 2730 days and 16 hours, or about 7.5 years.] If any errors were detected, the Logical Block Address (LBA) of the first error is printed in decimal notation. On Linux systems the smartmontools web page has instructions about how to convert this LBA address to the name of the disk file containing the erroneous block.

shodanshok
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