I get an email about the same SMART error every day. I'd like to configure the SMART daemon to ignore this specific error, but only this, since I still want to now if anything changes or gets worse.
This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on: host name: jon DNS domain: [Unknown] NIS domain: (none) The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], 11 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors For details see host's SYSLOG. You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation. The original email about this issue was sent at Sun Nov 25 02:30:45 2012 CET Another email message will be sent in 24 hours if the problem persists.
When this first happened, the number of unreadable sectors was slowly increasing, so made a backup and tried many things described in this thread: https://serverfault.com/questions/104417/how-do-i-easily-repair-a-single-unreadable-block-on-a-linux-disk
As you can see from the email, this was 1.5 years ago, so I don't exactly remember what I tried and what not. However, the disk remains stable and working since then, so I don't see any reason to change anything. (Yes, I regularly create backups.)
I can only think of a workaround, which would be to ignore all mails containing this exact text, but this would only be treating symptoms, not the cause.
Edit:
I know many or most of you will give me the "replace the disk" advice, which in general is the best possible advice for a question like "I get this error, what should I do?"
But please, please accept that I'm aware of the risk and asking a very specific question regarding the SMART daemon. I didn't find anything in the docs that would indicate it is possible to do what I want, but I wanted to double check here first before going with my workaround.
Update:
About a week ago, the counter went down to 1 again. I have no idea what caused this, I did not maintenance work whatsoever on that machine. After more than 2 years, 11 sectors just got okay again. This is really weird.