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I'm wondering if there's any common way to reset SMART readings on a hard disk.

The reason is that I got long ago one of those cheap USB 3.0 drives (sold by LG but the inner HDD seems to be Toshiba). It so happens that I plugged it on a USB 3.0 hub without external power and it started clicking and making noises, and mostly wouldn't work.

Some times it would actually power up, and SMART started showing sector reallocations and tons of other errors.

I got the disk abandonded on a box (since returning it was almost as expensive as the disk was in this case).

Fast forward a few months to yesterday, and I found the hard disk in the box while making some cleanup. I tried it again, and clicking noises again... I was about to throw it to the trash bin, when I tried something else as a last resort, and plugged it directly to the USB 3.0 ports in the mainboard: there it works perfectly!

So I kept making some tests, and got some power supply (from another hub) for this USB 3.0 hub, and once again: working perfectly.

It seems the hub couldn't give it enough current while connected only to the desktop.

Thing is, there are tons of SMART errors (from the past tests) on the disk, however I've done some surface tests and everything looks ok on the disk (while plugged to the powered hub, that is). So I'd like to have a way to "reset" all the smart readings so that it looks like factory-new and start testing again, see if SMART keeps giving bad readings after this.

Any possible way?

PS: not that I'm going to "trust" this hard disk for anything important, but I could give it a few uses

Jcl
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4 Answers4

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PS: not that I'm going to "trust" this hard disk for anything important, but I could give it > a few uses

There is no need to delete important failure information because this information does not affect you using it. To be able to compare just redirect your current SMART state by running smartmontools with a command like smartctl -a /dev/sdX > C:\mysmartlog.txt on a windows machine where "X" stands for the drive in question.

Rerun it later whenever you want to know and simply compare the text files created.

The only motivation to delete SMART information is fraudulous intention.

r2d3
  • 4,050
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Yes, but it may need a it of effort to find a tool which you can use for any specific brand.

For example, you can try reset SMART on HGST, IBM, Hitachi, Toshiba drives using the free Victoria for Windows (ON YOUR OWN RISK!!): https://hdd.by/victoria/

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Example can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/845tH2v1Lv0

SMART data and logs are kept in a drive's service area. So idea is to access this area using so called vendor specific commands. Data recovery labs do this routinely using tools like PC3000 (https://www.acelab.eu.com/catalog/)

Companies that offer refurbished drives often use similar hardware to which larger batched of drives can be attached. These devices

  • Test the surface
  • map out defects often using the P-List rather than the G-List. The G-List is the grown defect list and the number of sectors in this list is what the SMART Reallocated attribute reflects.
  • reset SMART

In addition, if it turns out an entire head is 'weak' or bad, the 'refurbisher' can decide disable the head, and offer the drive with reduced capacity.

2

SMART is meant to be an audit of the drives history and is maintained by the drive itself, so you cannot "reset" or "clear" SMART values.

More Info from ask ubuntu

Community
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shobi
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0

Edit: Tools have been released since this answer that has been submitted which in fact allow some drives SMART data to be rewritten. The only way to verify the drive is to buy from reputable online sellers.

SMART generally speaking cannot be reset, that way people buying used drives can see exactly what has happened with the drive.

If you are not going to re-sell the drive, don't worry about it, just note the current numbers so you can see an increase.

If the drive passes a SHORT and LONG test via the vendor's HDD test, the drive is good.

SMART data can be misleading due to what the numbers actually mean, I would read the SMART data via the vendors HDD test app to see if the drive even fails the a SMART test.

Brian D.
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