Last night I noticed one of my drives had the warning symbol on it with the note "command timeout".  Looking into it the SMART attribute command timeout has a raw value of 65537.  I have a new drive arriving tomorrow that I had intended on swapping out another, smaller drive (that doesnt have errors), but now I am thinking I should just replace this one with the error.  How bad is this error?

 

#	Attribute Name	Flag	Value	Worst	Threshold	Type	Updated	Failed	Raw Value
1	Raw read error rate	0x000f	119	099	006	Pre-fail	Always	Never	215227321
3	Spin up time	0x0003	095	094	000	Pre-fail	Always	Never	0
4	Start stop count	0x0032	097	097	020	Old age	Always	Never	3295
5	Reallocated sector count	0x0033	100	100	036	Pre-fail	Always	Never	0
7	Seek error rate	0x000f	049	049	030	Pre-fail	Always	Never	120262178241
9	Power on hours	0x0032	083	083	000	Old age	Always	Never	15377 (1y, 8m, 29d, 17h)
10	Spin retry count	0x0013	100	100	097	Pre-fail	Always	Never	0
12	Power cycle count	0x0032	100	100	020	Old age	Always	Never	200
183	Runtime bad block	0x0032	100	100	000	Old age	Always	Never	0
184	End-to-end error	0x0032	100	100	099	Old age	Always	Never	0
187	Reported uncorrect	0x0032	100	100	000	Old age	Always	Never	0
188	Command timeout	0x0032	100	099	000	Old age	Always	Never	65537
189	High fly writes	0x003a	100	100	000	Old age	Always	Never	0
190	Airflow temperature cel	0x0022	070	058	045	Old age	Always	Never	30 (min/max 23/35)
194	Temperature celsius	0x0022	030	042	000	Old age	Always	Never	30 (0 18 0 0 0)
195	Hardware ECC recovered	0x001a	037	025	000	Old age	Always	Never	215227321
197	Current pending sector	0x0012	100	100	000	Old age	Always	Never	0
198	Offline uncorrectable	0x0010	100	100	000	Old age	Offline	Never	0
199	UDMA CRC error count	0x003e	200	200	000	Old age	Always	Never	0
240	Head flying hours	0x0000	100	253	000	Old age	Offline	Never	8045 (23 62 0)
241	Total lbas written	0x0000	100	253	000	Old age	Offline	Never	3239767804
242	Total lbas read	0x0000	100	253	000	Old age	Offline	Never	595120869

I believe it's a non-issue. See this thread: https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=44269.0 In Settings -> Disk Settings you'll see that SMART Parameter 188 is now ignored by default. Some brands of hard disk don't even report it.

 

In any case the Worst value of 99 is still a long way above the Threshold value of 0. You might want to check occasionally to see if this Worst value gets worse (closer to 0, i.e. smaller) over time.

 

 

Thanks for the info.  I'll keep an eye on it and swap out one of my small drives.  My drive is a seagate, so based on the reports, it makes sense that this is might show up.

Large raw numbers for 188 just mean that it's either not using the latest smartctl program, or the SMART database is not up to date, or the database hasn't been updated for that specific drive model.  When interpreted correctly, it looks like 3 small numbers.  I believe "65537" is actually "0 1 1", which just means you have had a single 'command timeout error', not something to worry about.