2 ms·

While the project is cool looking it's totally usele^W^W usefulness is quite questionable. In my life I've seen totally dead disks with ideal SMART and disks w

While the project is cool looking it's totally usele^W^W usefulness is quite questionable. In my life I've seen totally dead disks with ideal SMART and disks with SMART indicating what I should had threw them out already yet they worked fine for a literally decade after that. I've configured monitoring and reporting for SMART attribute changes, I've used all available SMART tools on the platforms to diagnose some acting up HDDs. I've replaced drives in the computers, servers, blades and SANs. I've ordered and/or supervised the replacement of drives by padawans and vendor engineers. You know what I never did? I never did had or want a dashboard with SMART statuses of all disks I'm responsible for. Because if the drives are healthy I have absolutely zero reason to watch that dashboard. And if some drive is acting up I just need a notification about that (and which disk and where it is) to order the replacement. Sure, for I'm in some different boat than the author of that project and it can be a cool nerd-party trick to show the SMART status of all of your 48 HDDs in your r/datahoard box... For all other situations (especially if you are on the operations side of things) look for a more classical (and probably more mature?) solutions.

LarsAlereon 4y ago
There's two kinds of SMART errors: soft errors, like read retries, occur in normal operation and tell you more about the environment the drive is operating than the health of the drive. Hard errors, like Reallocated sectors, never occur in normal operation so the first time the drive logs one that means the drive is failing and you need to replace it. Monitoring for the first kind of error is pointless, but closely monitoring for the second kind of error will improve your chances of replacing a drive before it loses your data. It's just unfortunate that the error thresholds built into drives won't throw a SMART failure warning before the drive is completely dead.
- wtallis 4y ago
  It's a very different story for SSDs. Those, you definitely do want to monitor in case your workload is burning through the rated write endurance faster than planned for. And reallocated sectors are usually not an urgent problem: a handful early in the life of the drive can be a normal consequence of vendors not aggressively testing (excessively wearing out) a drive before it leaves the factory, and a steadily increasing number as a drive approaches end of life is expected behavior. But SMART errors usually won't help you know when you're about to lose an SSD to a catastrophic firmware bug, which for many use cases is the more likely cause of death.

LarsAlereon 4y ago

There's two kinds of SMART errors: soft errors, like read retries, occur in normal operation and tell you more about the environment the drive is operating than the health of the drive. Hard errors, like Reallocated sectors, never occur in normal operation so the first time the drive logs one that means the drive is failing and you need to replace it. Monitoring for the first kind of error is pointless, but closely monitoring for the second kind of error will improve your chances of replacing a drive before it loses your data. It's just unfortunate that the error thresholds built into drives won't throw a SMART failure warning before the drive is completely dead.

wtallis 4y ago
It's a very different story for SSDs. Those, you definitely do want to monitor in case your workload is burning through the rated write endurance faster than planned for. And reallocated sectors are usually not an urgent problem: a handful early in the life of the drive can be a normal consequence of vendors not aggressively testing (excessively wearing out) a drive before it leaves the factory, and a steadily increasing number as a drive approaches end of life is expected behavior. But SMART errors usually won't help you know when you're about to lose an SSD to a catastrophic firmware bug, which for many use cases is the more likely cause of death.