smartctl question

[Lucas B. Cohen]

Hi,

On 2012.11.09 12:18, H. Ingow wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> one single disk in a zfs mirror failed permanently throwing errors like 
> kernel: (ada5:ata10:0:0:0): ATA status: 51 (DRDY SERV ERR), error: 84
> (ICRC ABRT ) and alike.
>  
> The pool itself continued working degraded, smartctl showed a very high
> 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count value, which to my knowledge may indicate a
> broken cable, in this case indeed a  cable replacement  solved the
> problem, the pool resilvered and all is fine.
> 
> Still smartctl -a displays a value of 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count I reckon 
> to be way too high, though ( > 3900 ) .
> So is this value now including errors from previous broken cable ?

I'm pretty sure it is. I don't think SMART attributes can vary in value
both up and down ; they seem to me like they're counters that can only
get incremented.

> In other words, when, if at all, is the cache smartmontools read from
> flushed and values are to be taken as of the status after fixing a
> hardware problem but not swapping the disk ?
So, in my opinion no.