S.M.A.R.T. hard drives WAS: SCSI vs. IDE performance test

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 01:04:27PM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:
>
>>If it runs out of spare blocks, then you're in trouble. And there's no warning
>>that you're running low on spare blocks in any particular region unless you
>>use special utilities to query the drive. Also if the failure is caused by
>>environmental factors like vibrations or heat then you can be in trouble too.
>
>
> Actually, drives have S.M.A.R.T for reporting these kind of issues. The idea
> being that a counter decrements every time a block is remapped. When it
> reaches a declared threshold the drive declares an error and if it's in
> warranty that's enough to convince the manufacturer to send you a new disk.
>
> Not that many people use this feature, but it is there.

I used smartsuite (http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartsuite/) to view
the status of the drives, but the relocated sector count appears only
available on ide drives. Does anyone know if that is the nature of scsi
drives or is it just a limitation of that tool?