Thanks Jeff,

This does support my current hypothesis that the SSD I was mounting on / 
is the most likely culprit.

What fun.

Joe

On 04/24/2013 10:27 AM, Jeff Siddall wrote:
> On 04/23/2013 07:20 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>>> disk utility show ... SMART [is] fine.
>>> >
>> SMART "health report" is useless. I had dead disks report "SMART OK" 
>> and perfectly functional disks report "SMART Failure, replace your 
>> disk now".
>
> Agreed.  SMART doesn't diagnose everything.
>
> On the flaky drive I recently replaced smart extended offline tests 
> all passed as did the smart health assessment check. Nothing else 
> wrong either (no pending/offline uncorrectable or CRC errors).  But it 
> surely was not working well.
>
> Jeff