Reading obfuscated Seagate SMART stats with smartctl

Alex Kretzschmar -

Reading a SMART report from a Seagate drive with smartctl can be bit tricky sometimes. Values that should be human readable are obfuscated. This can lead to issues in all sorts of tools, but what we really want is just a simple number.

Note the high RAW_VALUE figures.

Thankfully, we can decode the output using the following command:

smartctl /dev/sdX -a -v 1,raw48:54 -v 7,raw48:54 -v 241,raw48:54 -v 242,raw48:54

The command takes the input of -v ID#,raw48:54 so if you wanted to read Raw_Read_Error_Rate as a human, you'd enter -v 1,raw48:54 as it correlates to the ID# column in the smartctl output.

Human readable smartctl output

That's all there is to it folks.