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How are S.M.A.R.T. statistics different from S.M.A.R.T. attributes?
For example, I have two drives. The first has 8 current pending sector counts and 8 offline uncorrectable sectors. These are both attributes; this drive doesn't support statistics. The smart daemon warned my about these problems, and since I'm familiar with how serious they are I replaced the drive pronto.
The second drive has 6 number of mechanical start failures: a statistic. It sounds serious, but the smart daemon did not warn me about them and so I don't know when they occurred. The drive is a year old, but all six events could have happened in the first six weeks for all I know. The drive's attributes are all OK.
user19087
Posted 2017-10-30T15:17:36.960
Reputation: 513
1Can't say I've ever seen a distinction between stats and attrib. To me the attribute is the name of the collection item, and the value is the statistic. – Frank Thomas – 2017-10-30T15:32:06.917
They're on different tabs in the gsmartcontrol UI. Attributes have: failed, norm'd, worst, threshold, raw, type, flags. Statistics have: value, flags, page, offset. – user19087 – 2017-10-30T16:53:25.323
The smartd manual mentions ACS-2 (ATA/ATAPI Command Set - 2) which is linked from the Wikipedia S.M.A.R.T. article. Relevant section Annex A.5. It is simply a description of the individual statistics plus binary layout. There is no motivating purpose. Many of the fields already exist as S.M.A.R.T. attributes, so there is quite a bit of overlap. You'd likely have to be familiar with the politics of S.M.A.R.T. to explain the difference between the two.
– user19087 – 2017-10-31T04:44:14.757