Thanks for the explanation. That was the information I was searching for.

The drive has failures (writing is very slow) and the smartstatus check does
not reveal the problem.
Therefore, I would prefer to keep the extra-checking of readattr in future and
ignore the "intelligent" decision the drive makes. This seems to be
manufacturer depended and not very reliable (at least, for me in this case).

Adding a short explanation in the readattr manual is a good choice.

On Apr 3, 2010, at 12:37 PM, Stuart Henderson wrote:

quoted text
> On 2010/04/03 07:51, Nicholas Marriott wrote:
>> Maybe the message in one or other of the cases should be different?
>
> The message in readattr is slightly different as it talks about
> values; I've tried a few other wordings but none have really improved
> clarity. I'd be more in favour of adding a short explanation to
> readattr in the manual (or just removing this check in readattr
> so it just displays the values returned from the drive and
> doesn't bother with any comparison..)
>
> smartstatus:
>
> 	No SMART threshold exceeded
> 	SMART threshold exceeded!
>
> readattr:
>
> 	One or more threshold values exceeded!