I have an older xSeries 306 that has started giving me a SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disk 2: SATA Port 0 message, a warning about backing up, and a message to Press F1 to continue. It's my understanding that SMART is actually part of the hard drive itself but this happens with hard drives that work fine in other systems. I've put a new hard drive in and am attempting to reinstall server 2003 (still get the SMART warning). The installer sees the hard drive and I get as far as formatting the drive. It just hangs at 0%. I assume this isn't really the the computer sensing a SMART problem but a problem with the server itself. Any ideas other than a bad motherboard of what could cause this?
By the way, this system only has 1 hard drive. I've never noticed it being referenced as "hard disk 2: SATA Port 0". Is that normal?
thanks
Best Answer
Yes, SMART metrics are gathered by the drive firmware, and as such are independent of which system they are put in.
However, the fact that some systems complain and some do not has nothing to do with any of the above-mentioned reasons.
It is simply the monitoring OS or application that decides what those metrics mean.
EDIT: well, not entirely - SMART also provides a single-value PASS/FAIL status that the OS or application can check, and that status is determined by the drive firmware.
However, any monitoring solution worth its salt will not only use that, but also interpret the actual values from the SMART table.