Here we briefly introduce an efficient open source tool, which can help you to get hints whether your disk is about to break soon or not. A project called S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools is hosted in sourceforge, the software runs on multiple platforms and might be worth a look.
Anil Gupta discusses in his blog about Google’s findings on using SMART data to predict hard drive failures. The main observation is that the available monitoring data is not precise enough to predict failures of a single disk. However, in larger configurations the increasing number of reported errors can be used to estimate when to start replacing the hardware. Especially, scan errors were seen to estimate failure better than some of the other metrics provided by the tool.
We also read a good introductory article on how to use the monitoring tools on Linux platform and followed the instructions. It was fairly easy to get started with SMART and see that our disk was doing fine. Of course, what really matters with using this kind of tools is to use them continuously and observing the changes in the metrics when the disks become aged.
0 Responses