Arch Linux

Description:

I started getting warnings regarding the health of my main hard disk drive (disk-warning.png). It appears to have 54 reallocated blocks on it.

However, Seagate advises that a few reallocated sectors are nothing to replace a disk for. From [1]:

"Current disk drives contain thousands of spare sectors which are automatically reallocated if the drive senses difficulty reading or writing. [..] Spare sector reallocation is a normal intelligent drive operation."

After some researching, I came across a bug [2] in Ubuntu that discusses these false positives given by libatasmart. To decide if there are too many reallocated sectors, libatasmart compares the number of reallocated sectors against sector_threshold. sector_threshold is calculated as the base-2 logarithm of the total number of sectors on the disk.

My 500GB disk has 976773168 sectors in total, so sector_threshold is equal to log2(976773168) which is about 30. This value is too low, and therefore the disk's 54 reallocated sectors are misinterpreted as an imminent disaster. :D

Debian and Ubuntu (maybe others too) have patched libatasmart so it won't use the above heuristic to determine whether the number of reallocated sectors is too high. As far as I can see, with the patch applied libatasmart will simply compare the normalized value against the threshold value. This is the behavior I would expect.

In the attached [disk-incorrect-status.png] you can see the disk report before applying the patch, and the after is in [disk-correct-status.png].

May I suggest we apply these patches too, possibly saving a few people the trouble and cost of replacing a perfectly good disk? :)

(The first patch makes querying a bit quicker, but I included it anyway as not to have to modify the second patch which didn't apply without the former.)

Additional info:
* package version(s): libatasmart 0.17-1


[1] http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=SeaTools_Error_Codes_-_Seagate_Technology&vgnextoid=d173781e73d5d010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/438136