Three Ways To Check Your Hard Drive Health Using SMART
By Alex Trent
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-05-26
Did you know that most modern hard drives store their own reliability data internally and have built in testing tools to check drive health?
The data provided by SMART is extensive, for example it provides a total of the Raw Read Error Rate, Spinup Time, Start/Stop Count, Reallocated Sector Count, Seek Error Rate, Power-On Hours, Spinup Retry Count, Power Cycle Count, Temperature Current/Max, Hardware ECC Recovered, Current Pending Sector Count, Uncorrectable Sector Count, and many more. Not all drives will provide all of the above information - some have less and some have more, it depends on how the hardware manufacturer implemented SMART with that particular version of the disk. Unfortunately, some manufacturers produce drives that do not support SMART. If you find that a drive reports that SMART is not supported, then you will be unable to examine the data that the SMART system provides and also unable to perform and of the built-in SMART drive tests. The SMART system also provides an overall-health self-assessment in the form of a PASSED or FAILED result. Before you look at the data for your drive using SMART, know that SMART is not perfect, and you may see some values that alarm you, but remember that SMART is just a prediction system that tries to predict if the disk will fail soon or not. However, if your disk fails the overall-health self-assessment, then you might want to back up your data as soon as possible.
SMART also supports three types of tests to help determine the health of a hard drive:
The Short Self-test: Short self-test consists of a collection of test routines that have the highest chance of detecting drive problems. Its result is reported in the Self-test Log. Note that this test is in no way comprehensive. Its main purpose is to detect totally damaged drives without running the full surface scan.
The Extended Self-test: Extended self-test examines complete disk surface and performs various test routines built into the drive. Its result is reported in the Self-test Log.
The Conveyance Self-test: Conveyance self-test is intended to identify damage incurred during transporting of the drive.
(Test descriptions taken from the GSmartControl application)
Now, on to how to perform SMART tests on your drive(s). The first way is probably the easiest, on GNOME based desktops, is the Palimpsest Disk Utility. If you have GNOME 2.28 or 2.30 (check by going to System > About GNOME) you probably have the Palimpsest Disk Utility. Go to System > Administration > Disk Utility and look for your drive in the left pane under the appropriate host adapter. Select the drive to examine by left-clicking on it. Information will appear in the right pane about the drive. Look in the second column just above the Volumes headline for 'SMART Data'. Click 'SMART Data'. The drive attributes will then be displayed in the bottom half of the window and other useful data like the Overall Assessment in the top half of the window. Right under the Overall Assessment, you'll see a 'Run Self-test' button. Click 'Run Self-test'. Select the type of test to perform, then click 'Run Self Test'.
There is also a GNOME program aimed at just smart tests and data viewing called GSmartControl. It provides some extra detail not provided by the Palimpsest Disk Utility. This program is not installed by default, usually so you'll have to grab it from your system's package manager if its available. If you've installed it, you'll find it in Applications > System Tools > GSmartControl. After starting the program, select a drive by double clicking on it and using the tabs at the top to navigate between the data provided and the test available.
The two aforementioned programs also have a command line predecessor (which GSmartControl is just a GUI front end for) called 'smartmontools'. Grab it with your system's package manager and perform tests and examine data from the console with the following commands.
To view all current smart data (also used to view tests percent complete and results data after tests are performed):
smartctl --all /dev/sdx (where 'sdx' is your drive's name, to see currently mounted drives just type 'mount')
To test a drive use:
smartctl -t testtype (replacing testtype with short, long or conveyance)
Lastly, there is one more tool you might want to take advantage of, it's called 'smart-notifier'. This program will run in the background and popup a notification if there is a problem detected with a drive. This information is usually provided on login.
Good luck testing all your drives!
About the Author:
Alex Trent is a staff writer for WebProNews
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