S.M.A.R.T. data on cloned drive same as original

[WB0HYQ]

I just finished cloning a 500Gb drive which "disks" showed was failing (mostly read failures) and wouldn't pass the self-test. I bought a 1Tb replacement (same brand - Western Digital) and used Clonezilla to copy it. THis worked to perfection with only one glitch: I forgot to add the "--rescue" switch at first. The cloned drive is now just fine and MUCH faster than it used to be. It was my Windows 7 drive for my dual-boot system. I used Windows to extend the partition beyond the 500G to 1Tb.

Now, the problem. In "disks" I've found the new drive has nearly all the SMART data the same as the old drive. The new drive was manufactured in August of 2020--the old drive was 7 years old, yet "disks" tell me virtually the same things are wrong with the new drive--mostly "Old Age" and 2 "pre-Fails". How can this be possible with a drive manufactured only two months ago? The only answer I can come up with is that Clonezilla was too efficient and copied EVERYTHING, including the SMART data.

Is there some step I missed that will erase the OLD data and give me the SMART readings for the new drive? I've tried "Refresh" but that only updates the amount of time the drive has been powered on (5+ hours). The "Help" entry in "disks" leads to "The URI 'help:gnome-help/disk does not point to a valid page" so that's out.

Bill

[TheFu]

SMART data always says Old Age and Pre-Fail for many parameters. I don't know why. I have 2 hr old HDDs that say that. Has nothing to do with cloning.

SMART data isn't stored where dd or any other imaging tool can access it. It is stored in the controller on the HDD/SSD, not on the platters.

You can look up what the SMART parameters mean to understand better when failure is more likely. However, around 22% of the time, the SMART data doesn't show anything before HDDs fail - this is from a backup vendor with over 100K disks online that has used over 300K disks since they started posting reliability numbers.

[WB0HYQ]

I had a feeling it was something like that. When i got to thinking about it, having SMART data where someone could get at it could cause fraudulent entries to make a shaky disk appear good. I've been around computers since 1962, and had my share of catastrophic failures with most kinds of hardware with no warning at all, like you say. I understand all the SMART parameters, it was just the phrasing like Old Age and Pre-Fail that threw me. I keep a handwritten log on each of my systems and enter everything I do to them so if/when I sell it, or donate it, I'll have a record of that its been through.

Thanks for the help, Fu.

Bill