[geeks] Murphy, instantiated

[nate at portents.com]

> SMART: I find it more useful than Google evidently did, but it's
> definitely not that great.  It has false positives, and there are some
> drive errors that it never seems to report, and some that it cannot
> report, like firmware errors.

A little known fact is that SMART is not actually a standard (well it was
briefly but was withdrawn) - which frankly is just pathetic.  I think it's
an indication of just how lazy and purely profit-driven the whole storage
industry is:

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/smartmontools_scsi.html

Here's the relevant bit from there:

     SMART never attained the status of "standard" and its original
documents have been withdrawn. Its catchy name lives on, especially on
vendors' web sites and obviously in the name of this toolset. Luckily the
good ideas in SMART have been incorporated into the ATA and SCSI standards
albeit in slightly different forms.
     Initially SMART began on SCSI disks as vendor specific extensions.
Gradually the SMART functionality has moved into the standards (often by
other names) and vendors are improving their standards' compliance. [In
the vendors' defence some of the "standards" are drafts and are yet to be
ratified.] Some SCSI disk vendors have product manuals (available on the
net) that cover the parts of the SCSI command set that their disks
support. Some of these manuals fill in details that are left deliberately
vague in the the standards.
     SCSI standards (found at www.t10.org) only make one footnote
reference to the term SMART. In its place the awkward term "Informational
Exceptions" is used. For SCSI tapes the term "TapeAlert" is used.

- Nate