What is the S.M.A.R.T. page?

Question

I've just listened to Steve Gibson talk about his SpinRite software, on the Security Now podcast episode 336 (transscript).

At 33:20 he says:

I can show and do show on the SMART page that sectors are being relocated and that errors are being corrected. That SMART analysis page sometimes scares people because it shows, wait a minute, this thing says we're correcting so many errors per megabyte.

What is this SMART page?

1) Some information saved on the HD by SMART, that I can access with a SMART tool like smartmontools?

2) A page (tab) in his SpinRite software?

In any case, can I see, in any way, what sectors are marked as bad, without using SpinRite? Preferably using smartmontools!

Answer 1

SMART is a protocol for 'talking' to a drive and asking it all sorts of questions. smartmontools is probably the right tool here, and gsmartcontrol is a nice graphical frontend for it. You can likely get all this information from smartmontools - view output shows the raw output, but the highlighting here shows the interesting stuff much more easily

This is a drive with bad sectors, on gsmartcontrol and you can see it has a reallocated sector count of 1.As you will see, smartmontools will give you this information if you run a self test.

and lots of other errors further down

and has very helpfully highlighted these in pink

It also has an error log which shows where this error is

after failing a test, as will the self test logs

Another approach would be to use badblocks or chkdsk with the right arguments to check the disk

As for the smart page itself...

I'm not a big fan of spinrite cause it often sounds like a whole load of science-fiction babble. Gibson claims to check the changes in smart status while the drive is working in order to work out if the drive is dying, and shows that information on a 'page' on spinrite - he goes in further detail, but I'm not convinced its worth repeating, since I don't understand most of it. However, the information is there, if you want to know, in Gibson's own words

Answer 2

What is this SMART page?

He really was sparse there. What he meant was the SMART report of the hard disk.

Some information saved on the HD by SMART, that I can access with a SMART tool like smartmontools?

SMART do not save anything in your drive, but more like S. M. A. R. T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a set of test that your drive do regularly to prevent failures and improve performance. You can access this data with smartmontools as you have said, since this information is independent to your OS. It shows all sorts of data about relocated sectors (as he mentions), spins ups/downs times of the drives, etc, etc.

A page (tab) in his SpinRite software?

Yes. This was what he was referring to. SMART page, SMART report, SMART visualized, SMART whatever. When you talk about S.M.A.R.T. you are talking about the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology included in all (modern) HD's. When you add another substantive is most likely to refer to a tool that reads/manipulate this data.

In any case, can I see, in any way, what sectors are marked as bad, without using SpinRite?

Yes. You can. The format the data is presented depends of the tool. Also, some vendors add their own CODES, so, sometimes you need their tools to read their codes. But! You don't need their tools specifically to read the SMART data of your Hard Drive.

Some insights about SpinRite

SpinRite seems to interpret the RAW data differently to your "Average Tool", taking in consideration other sets of parameters which they consider important, relevant, informative or preventive. Their tool just postprocessing the data is already there and shows it into an easy to understand way. You may have an idea of what could go wrong if you read the RAW data, SpinRite process the data and tells you exactly what (they consider) is bad.