Please help in diagnosing these smartmon messages

[Andrew Falanga]

HI,

I just installed smartmontools from ports on my churches system and I think 
I'm glad I did.  However, not being completely familiar with it, I'd like 
some help with the messages (and errors) that have been discovered thus far 
(since I installed it on Saturday, yikes!).

First was this, and it's repeated in the log /var/log/messages frequently:

Feb  4 18:19:44 whitbap smartd[64783]: Device: /dev/ad0, 12 Currently 
unreadable (pending) sectors


Even though this entry comes from today, this was e-mailed to me within hours 
of enabling smartd on Saturday.  I understand what sectors are and I know 
what unreadable is.  I was wondering what "pending" meant.

Then, yesterday I was e-mailed this one:

Feb  3 02:49:44 whitbap smartd[64783]: Device: /dev/ad0, Self-Test Log error 
count increased from 0 to 1

Using smartctl I found that option "-l" with the argument "selftest" would 
give me more information.  This is what I found:

whitbap# smartctl -l selftest /dev/ad0
smartctl version 5.37 [i386-portbld-freebsd6.2] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce 
Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  
LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed: read failure       70%     60397         
67413
# 2  Short offline       Completed: read failure       70%     60373         
67413


I know it's probably near impossible to know exactly how much longer this 
drive has, but how serious are these errors?  As I mentioned, the unreadable 
sectors on the hard drive are repeated many times in the log ( > 100 times).

Thanks all,
Andy