Mike,
As you have discovered the S.M.A.R.T. report of "
verified" doesn't mean much. I have had two failed drives that still passed the "
verified" test. In fact according to the Google Labs white paper,
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, S.M.A.R.T. is a poor indicator of drive health. Primarily because it is left up to the manufacturer to determine the failure levels and they have a financial incentive to be overly optimistic. Additionally the "
verified" reading is based on a subset of the actual S.M.A.R.T. parameters. AFIK TechTool Pro is the only utility that reports
all the S.M.A.R.T. values
individually. In both of my cases, TTP showed a non-standard parameter that was out of tolerance while Disk Utility, Drive Genius, and OnyX reported
verified.
The aforementioned white paper indicates the best indicator of drive health is a surface scan, which can take several hours to accomplish on a large drive. If
new bad data blocks are found on a drive, that drive is 39 times more likely to fail within the next 60 days than a drive with no new bad data blocks.
In any case your drive, as were mine, is toast regardless of whether or not the S.M.A.R.T. is
verified and must be replaced. I now make it a policy to run a full surface scan on any drive, before putting it into service and at least quarterly thereafter. It is a time consuming pain in the nether regions of the anatomy, but well worth the time and effort if it prevents data loss.
