Posted by: Karsten M. Self
on February 08, 2005 08:25 AM
Pretty much any hard drive manufactured in the past seven years has S.M.A.R.T. capabilities -- that's self monitoring analysis and reporting technology. This won't help you revive a long-idle dead drive. It may give you advance warning of an impending drive failure.
You can access the SMART features under Linux with <tt>smartmontools</tt>. They key facts are these:
A short test (runs in two minutes) detects most errors, but has a higher false-positive rate.
A long test takes a while (nominally 20-30 minutes) has a very low false-positive rate.
Most distros allow for installing the SMART monitoring tools. Check your logs for any test errors. You can plan your drive replacement while data are still accessible.
Details: <A HREF="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983" title="linuxjournal.com">Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART</a linuxjournal.com>, <A HREF="http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/" title="sourceforge.net">http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/</a sourceforge.net>. The linked whitepapers at the latter give a good overview of the stats associated with the tests, though the long/short test info is most of what you need to know.
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Posted by: Karsten M. Self on February 08, 2005 08:25 AMPretty much any hard drive manufactured in the past seven years has S.M.A.R.T. capabilities -- that's self monitoring analysis and reporting technology. This won't help you revive a long-idle dead drive. It may give you advance warning of an impending drive failure.
You can access the SMART features under Linux with <tt>smartmontools</tt>. They key facts are these:
Most distros allow for installing the SMART monitoring tools. Check your logs for any test errors. You can plan your drive replacement while data are still accessible.
Details: <A HREF="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983" title="linuxjournal.com">Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART</a linuxjournal.com>, <A HREF="http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/" title="sourceforge.net">http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/</a sourceforge.net>. The linked whitepapers at the latter give a good overview of the stats associated with the tests, though the long/short test info is most of what you need to know.
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