Boooooo! Could cause total data loss.

sudo smartctl --all --json /dev/sda

Created attachment 133766 [details]
output of smartctl

  "smart_status": {
    "passed": true

:S firmware being silly. the thing is, I'm not sure what to anchor a judgement that the disk is failing on when the firmware says it is ok. the attributes seem all within range. in the self test logs there are repeated failures but they appear largely on different blocks and 37 hours prior to the last failure the test completed without error... despite having had read failures before that. I'm not sure what to make of that. 

What information do YOU expect?

Kind dupe of #429331 but there the disk at least has a streak of failures on the same block.

(In reply to Harald Sitter from comment #4)
>   "smart_status": {
>     "passed": true
> 
> :S firmware being silly. the thing is, I'm not sure what to anchor a
> judgement that the disk is failing on when the firmware says it is ok. the
> attributes seem all within range. in the self test logs there are repeated
> failures but they appear largely on different blocks and 37 hours prior to
> the last failure the test completed without error... despite having had read
> failures before that. I'm not sure what to make of that. 
> 
> What information do YOU expect?
> 
> Kind dupe of #429331 but there the disk at least has a streak of failures on
> the same block.

saying "This device appears to be working as expected" when there are
failures in a self test does not sound correct.
I expect that kinfocenter warns about any failure in any self test.

new info was added in comment 5.

*** Bug 429331 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I've pondered this a bit and come to conclude that we'll probably need an additional level of vagueness simply anchored to the return value of smartctl - "problems appeared now or in the past. all may be well or not. travel to the oracle of delphi for further information". Kinda sucks though, but then there's little opportunity to keep the output digestible while also being more appreciative of the firmware reporting OK while having errors logged.

A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-disks/-/merge_requests/14

Git commit 3d10fed37315a7dd7bcee66797b74ece615a2217 by Harald Sitter.
Committed on 09/03/2021 at 12:14.
Pushed by sitter into branch 'master'.

report smartctl failure codes to the user

as it turns out there are a number of issues that do not result in an
actually bad SMART status and would not get reported to the user. to
keep the code lean we'll simply look at the exit code bits of smartctl
as they more or less cover all failure scenarios anyway. we'll then
translate those to pretty strings and expose them on the Device objects
for consumption in the qml KCM as "instabilities". they are set visually
apart from actual bad status through different icon and description
because it's hard to say if an instability is in fact indicative of
imminent hard-failure or merely a hiccup (e.g. power loss during a disk
operation).
FIXED-in: 5.22

M  +22   -1    autotests/smartdatatest.cpp
M  +2    -0    src/CMakeLists.txt
M  +15   -1    src/device.cpp
M  +14   -1    src/device.h
A  +60   -0    src/instabilities.cpp     [License: GPL(3+eV) GPL(v3.0) GPL(v2.0)]
A  +15   -0    src/instabilities.h     [License: GPL(3+eV) GPL(v3.0) GPL(v2.0)]
M  +34   -11   src/kcm/package/contents/main.qml
M  +3    -2    src/smartctl.cpp
M  +0    -28   src/smartctl.h
M  +12   -2    src/smartdata.cpp
M  +19   -1    src/smartdata.h
A  +4    -0    src/smartfailure.cpp     [License: GPL(3+eV) GPL(v3.0) GPL(v2.0)]
A  +43   -0    src/smartfailure.h     [License: GPL(3+eV) GPL(v3.0) GPL(v2.0)]
M  +3    -2    src/smartmonitor.cpp
M  +17   -6    src/smartnotifier.cpp

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-disks/commit/3d10fed37315a7dd7bcee66797b74ece615a2217