# Intel Raid - Is "Smart Event" indicative of failing drive?



## John_Dumke

Recenting upon rebooting, I noticed that one of the drives in the Raid 0 array is flagged as "Smart Event" in Red text. 

Reading everything on the web (googled "Intel Raid" + "Smart Event"), leaves me with a very vauge conclusion, that there is something wrong with the hard drive, possibly eminant failure. There is very little info on the web, even in Intel's 90 page "Application Accelerator Raid Edition Manual" pdf document it only says...

Smart Event - "Disk has exceeded its recoverable error" threshold and is at risk of failure.

But the computer works fine!

Nothing in the Intel Raid configuration utility enables me to get more info or reset this item, to see if it happens again. 

As a percaution, I have been doing a complete system backup every night and have an extra drive to replace the defective one should it go. But I don't want to replace it if it is still working fine and was just a one time issue.

Does anybody have any experience with what a "smart event" is trying to tell me. Or, is there any type of utility that can run a test on a hard drive.


System: ASUS P4P800 - Deluxe, 2x WD250gig SATA drives.


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## johnwill

I'd probably heed the warning, a SMART error normally really does indicate something is declining. Here's some info on SMART, my experience has been that it has a high degree of reliabilty in predicting future failures. Many times, some of the monitored parameters predict hard drive failure in advance of total failure.

_This hardware feature is called S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu, Quantum, Western Digital, and other drive manufacturers put this feature into their disk drives. Typical attributes that are monitored include head flying height, temperature, spin-up time, retries, and internal error logs. 

*How does S.M.A.R.T. Work?*
Failures can be seen from two standpoints: predictable and unpredictable. Unpredictable failures, such as power surges that can cause failure, occur quickly. Predictable failures are characterized by degradation of an attribute over time, before the disk drive fails. Many mechanical failures are typically considered predictable because of degradation in a disk drive's attributes such as head flying height, which would indicate a potential head crash. Certain electronic failures also show degradation before failing._


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## crazijoe

You may want to back up any critical data, download the drive manufacturers disk utility and run a diagnostic against the drive. Run the utility aganst the drive in question only and not the entire RAID.


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## John_Dumke

*"Smart Event" HD replaced + 2 Questions....*

Thanks for both replys. Since this is a business computer, and a new WD250JD HD was only $130 bucks, I thought it wasn't worth it to risk an unplanned failure. The process was pretty easy....

1) I created a disk image of the hard drives using Acronis True Image.
2) Shut the computer down and replaced the drive in question.
3) Rebooted, CTRL I into Raid utility, delete array, create array.
4) Boot with Acronis recovery disc.
5) Restore image
6) Both drives now show NORMAL (no SMART EVENT)

The only bummer... I was going to chage from Raid 0 to Raid 1, but Acronis True Image didn't like restoring to a different drive/configuration even though a single 250GB drive was big enough.

Question.... What do you guys use as a disaster recovery software.

And while I am on this topic......

I just got a Buffalo Technolgy Terastation (1 Terabyte), it has 4 x 250 gig drives, which I set up as RAID 5 750 gigs + 250 gigs for parity info.

Question.... Does this RAID 5 setup really protect the data if only one drive goes out? I read up on Parity, but it only served to totally confuse me.


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## crazijoe

I would still check the questioned drive with the utility. 

Where I work, we use Veritas Backup Exec 9.1. We backup the system state of all our servers, exchange mailbox store and we have a Dell PowerVault with about 200GB of data that back up onto a Sony 15 slot tape library. We don't back up any of the client machines because they shouldn't be storing anything on them anyways. If we have any problems with a users machine, we just push down a new image of it with RIS.

Yes a RAID 5 will protect the data if a drive goes out. However if you lose 2 drives, you will lose the data. Best senario, if the controller is capable of it, use more than 3 drives with a hot spare. This way if a drive fails, the hot spare will kick in and the array will rebuild itself. And when you get the warning that a drive has failed, just replace the drive and it will become the new hot spare.


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