Evaluating Mechanical Hard Drives SMART Data in Linux (Ubuntu) Using the Disks Utility.

[abajor]

I've gotten into the habit of Looking at peoples Mechanical Hard drives with a Ubuntu thumb drive to boot their system.
I understand the raw values are not really uniform between manufacturers, but I have noticed that high seek and read error raw values at the very least correlate to a drive that is going to have sub par access time, and extremely slow OS booting.
The odd thing is I've often seen very high seek and read error rates on drives with fairly low on time.

Does anybody have any other takes on evaluating smart data? I've used Crystal Disk Info, It seems to present the values differently, and sometimes I suspect they low ball certain values?

[CapLeaker]

I' e got a few boxes full of HDD's 3.5” and the 5 1/4”. I did find a much higher percentage of real slow or failing 3.5” HDD's than the 5 1/4 with anything short as a day of total runtime. The lower the days it ran, usually the.higher risk of failing faster. I think that is because the laptop or external HDD got dropped.
On the other hand, I've got some old desktop HDD's spinning 24/7 with over 11 years of on time and have little or no errors in smart data. I had HDDs that would last exactly the warranty period plus one week, I hardly had ever luck with warranty on a HDD.

[lti]

Seagate drives normally have huge raw values for read and seek error rates while being perfectly healthy (aside from a few failure-prone models).

I never noticed a difference between CrystalDiskInfo and other SMART monitoring tools.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

thing is crystal disk info (windows) lists the smart values as raw hex values by default instead of decimal like other smart utilities. so u have to either use the calculator in programmer mode to convert the hex values to decimal or just find the menu option in crystal disk info to list the values in decimal instead of hex.

the linux disks utility is also called gnome disk utility. i find that it doesnt display some types of smart info correctly for some ssds and helium filled hard drives like the lba read and write, number of ssd sudden poweroffs and the helium indicator for helium filled hard drives. so i use gsmartcontrol instead. gsmartcontrol displays that info correctly. so there's other smart utilities to try out in linux if one doesnt work or displays bogus values.

[abajor]

thing is crystal disk info (windows) lists the smart values as raw hex values by default instead of decimal like other smart utilities. so u have to either use the calculator in programmer mode to convert the hex values to decimal or just find the menu option in crystal disk info to list the values in decimal instead of hex.

the linux disks utility is also called gnome disk utility. i find that it doesnt display some types of smart info correctly for some ssds and helium filled hard drives like the lba read and write, number of ssd sudden poweroffs and the helium indicator for helium filled hard drives. so i use gsmartcontrol instead. gsmartcontrol displays that info correctly. so there's other smart utilities to try out in linux if one doesnt work or displays bogus values.

I will have to check out gsmartcontrol.
I definitely prefer checking drives in linux, since it doesn't have the bad habit of trying to handshake and index a bad drive like windows.