[SLUG] Hard drive health monitoring

[lukekendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Excellent article in Linux Journal on a little-known facility built in
to most ATA and SCSI drives to allow monitoring of the health of the
disc drive, and even being alerted before a drive fails:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6983

I downloaded smartmontools-5.26, compiled and installed it with no
problems, and did thinsg like smartctl -s on to turn on health
monitoring and configured /etc/smartd.conf and added smartd.initd to
/etc/init.d and ran chkconfig to add it in.

In the last 10 years I think I've had four HDD fail on me (though not
lost data, fortunately, since I do try to be careful with backups).

smartmon should give you at least 24 hours notice of a failing drive. 
Sounds like a good combination with software raid!

 1090  smartctl -i /dev/hda
 1091  smartctl -s on /dev/hda
 1094  smartctl -i /dev/hda
 1095  smartctl -Hc /dev/hda
 1101  smartctl -A /dev/hda
 1103  smartctl -l error /dev/hda
 1104  smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda

I've never heard of such a facility for Windows.  <smug smile>

luke