[joenathan]

This is good info to know, helps me as a sysadmin to be confident in making decisions for my customers and their data. I regularly use a tool called Crystaldiskinfo to check the SMART stats of drives. Will pay more attention to the raw values in the future.

[takeda]

It's interesting that most people rely on the raw values, since the standard does not require them to be meaningful and depending on the vendor it could be anything.

I suspect this is because value, worst, threshold columns are kind of confusing to understand.

[toast0]

There aren't too many vendors for spinning disks, and if you have a lot of disks it doesn't take too long to see that the sector count metrics correspond to sectors. In my experience, bad sector count is a good predictor of future trouble, and running disks until they threw read errors (before we were running smart monitoring), they all had lots of bad sectors. That said, there's a threshold, getting to 100 slowly is probably ok, a thousand is probably not.

SSDs though, they just disappear from the bus when they fail; so I haven't been able to look at a dead one and see what looks like a useful predictor. I have seen some ssds reallocating a big block, which kills performance while its going on...