[Question] could Seagate release officia documentation on (in particular vendor) SMART attributes for their drive modesl

[calestyo]

Hey

Describe what you need help with

I know this isn't about openSeaChest per se, but I guess it's still the best chance to reach someone of Seagate and get things going.

Recently, I've wondered whether Helium loss might (realistically) become an issue, in particular when using drives beyond the usual 5-year warranty.

So I hoped that there might simply be some SMART value which tells one the remaining Helium, via a pressure sensor or so.

And it seems there is, at least I found so for some non-Seagate drives.

smartmontools didn’t show me for my Seagate drives though, but apparently they have such attribute, too, as is even mentioned in your wiki here, but the information there (that it's attribute ID 200) is still a bit vague.

Vague in the sense of "is that really the attribute for all drive models / FW versions"?

So question is, couldn’t Seagate release some specs per drive model (and if it should change between FW versions, for these too) which attribute is exactly what (in particular for the vendor specific ones)?

I cannot imagine that these are trade secrets you'd need to hide from your competitors... and users would surely benefit from it - and ultimately, Seagate, too: more (understandable) SMART info => less data loss, happier customer... and also, if the customer has more SMART info, he may likely even buy a new drive earlier ;-)

So perhaps you could internally forward that to someone or so.

Thanks,
Chris.

[vonericsen]

Hi @calestyo,

Thanks for the question! The "SMART guy" is OoO at the moment, but I will pass this to him...he is the one who reviewed the wiki for accuracy before I published it.

[calestyo]

Thanks :-)

[vonericsen]

Hi @calestyo,

I was able to talk to our "SMART guy" about this question, and I made some clarifications in the Wiki.

The short version is that list of attributes applies to all Seagate HDDs, with variations between models in what the hardware and firmware can monitor. I put a list of examples out there to reference.
Seagate uses attribute 200 to monitor helium pressure and other vendors use a different value (I think WD is 22 or something like that).
For this Seagate attribute it's a simple pass/fail for the pressure. When it fails that means it's time to backup before the heads are no longer able to fly correctly due to helium loss.
As this attribute begins approaching the threshold, the nominal/current value will begin to drop. The rate of decrease will depend on the rate of helium loss.
Making a backup before it trips is always a good idea, but the design is to trip before it completely stops working so data can still be read and backed up.