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 ?