Dear Lazyweb,
Just been playing with SmartMonTools under Linux to monitor the attributes of my SATA drives (something I’d not bothered to do since upgrading from my old Adaptec SCSI RAID system) and found that it was alerting me about:
Device: /dev/sda, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 190 Unknown_Attribute.
A lot of digging around found nothing (except other people wondering what it was), until I stumbled upon a page about the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3300622AS at Cropel S.M.A.R.T. hard drive monitoring which says:
190 Airflow temperature
Aha! Now smartctl -a /dev/sda -d ata tells me:
190 Unknown_Attribute 0x0022 040 040 045 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 74024484924
Now given that I’m unwilling to believe that the air temperature of my drive is really 74 billion Celsius (three orders of magnitude hotter than the corona of the Sun) there’s got to be something else going on here..
So – does anyone out there have any good ideas ?
Perhaps 74.02 degrees C is possible? However 74.02 degrees F seems to be within pretty normal ranges (23.34 degrees C).
G’day John!
The drive temperature itself was about 40-50C, so I’d reckon it’s unlikely that the air would be 74C. As for Farenheit, that’s so last century! 🙂
I found some information on Wikipedia (search the following page for “190”):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology&oldid=109907538
For Western Digital drives, 190 is “Airflow Temperature”, but for Seagate, it is “Temperature Difference from 100”, allowing the manufacturer to set a minimum threshold which corresponds to a maximum temperature.
So, from your smartctl output:
190 Unknown_Attribute 0x0022 040 040 045 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 74024484924
Fields 4,5, and 6 in the above line are: VALUE, WORST, and THRESH. Thus you have a value of 40, which corresponds to 100-40=60 degrees Celsius.
Make sense? The last field, the really large integer, is the RAW_VALUE, which I assume smartctl knows how to decode properly.
Aha – thanks Darren, useful information!
I didn’t pick up on the significance of those three digits, I was focussing (probably incorrectly) on that last number.
I have a Seagate drive, and SMART attribute 190 fails too.