Hard drive manufacturers provide their own native monitoring tool to track hard drive health and performance. Monitoring tools from Hard Drive manufacturers:.There are a few ways to monitor Hard Drives, as follows:
How to monitor RAID Hard Disk Health status? Such disasters are easily avoidable using RAID hard disk monitoring software. Hence, if the disaster strikes the hard disk during an unmonitored phase, then the results will not be shown until the next check or there’s a functional issue. The situation can be easily avoided by being proactive and monitoring the RAID Hard Disk health status on Windows.Īn important point to note is that checking the hard disk (even if it is done at regular intervals) does not monitor the gadget 24x7. The fact is that ‘periodic’ health monitoring is not enough, as the time period between two checkups may be enough to corrupt the disk and affect the entire RAID. Meaning, there’s a delay in detecting the issue when measured against its actual moment of occurrence.Īdministrators often complain that a RAID configuration failed due to corrupt disk, despite regular monitoring of hard disk health and configuration. Because, with intervals-based disk checking, you would not be able to track down disk health issues that cropped up during the unmonitored phase. It’s no surprise that drives that get too hot or are otherwise stressed beyond normal limits tend to fail early.Continuous monitoring of RAID health is a better practice than checking disk health in intervals. Smartctl also reports on things like drive temperature, how long the drive has been powered on, how many times it has been started and shut down etc. They point out that maybe a quarter of their drives fail when all these statistics are 0, so a healthy SMART report does not necessarily mean a healthy drive, but almost none of their drives survive having errors on all five counts. SMART 197 | Current Pending Sector Timeout |ī (who run huge raid arrays) have a lot of interesting information on their site. SMART 187 | Reported Uncorrectable Errors | stats that can be looked at which will provide clues: When you read the “When things go wrogn” section, you will see that smartctl is a very important diagnostic tool, but it also provides a lot of proactive information to help you anticipate a drive failure. This tool tells you all sorts of information about your drives.
It’s not unknown for the daemon to fail.ĭon’t rely on this! Check regularly on a manual basis! It won’t tell you if anything goes wrong with the monitoring! You cannot assume – even if you put this in your boot-up sequence as you should – that you will be notified about important events. It will daemonize and run in the background, sending an email to the specified address if it detects any problems related to a disk failure. Mdadm –monitor –scan –mail will fire up mdadm to keep an eye on your arrays. The author leaves xosview running permanently on his desktop to provide an overview of system performance. It is currently (2016) being updated to read the status directly from /sys, and should hopefully soon be able to display raid status correctly.
It is capable of displaying the state of raid arrays, but unfortunately currently the code is broken – it reads mdstat, and doesn’t understand the current output. Xosview is a venerable utility, and one of the author’s favourites. This will tell you the state of your arrays, and very importantly it will tell you whether any drives have failed, and whether any arrays are degraded. You should get to know /proc/mdstat, looking at it often. How to check the raid controller on Linux:Ġ1:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2208 (rev 05)