Again, check your results against the Wikipedia link posted throughout the article.Īnyhow, there’s another article in the books. Seriously, the GUI method with gnome-tools works just fine for this if you’d prefer to go that route. Like so: A nice GUI way! Give it a shot if you want!īut, that’d be cheating! It’d also be a much more basic article and where’s the fun in that? Nowhere. It’s right there in the ‘three dot’ menu. If that’s more your style, just install it and poke around. Chances are good that all the distros out there that have smartmontools also have gnome-disks. You know, if you install ‘gnome-disks’ then you can just do all of this graphically. The most interesting/valuable disk health checks are covered above, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing more about your tools. Simply run man smartctl and look through the options. There’s more to smartctl and even smartmontools, but not a whole lot that’s terribly interesting or important. With that information in hand, you can keep a reasonable eye on your disk health. You can check the results and technical details against the Wikipedia link. If you want to do that, first open the terminal with CTRL + ALT + T and, once open, enter the appropriate command.Īnyhow, pay attention to the results in that report. Smartmontools is easily installed with your package manager, or you can do it in the terminal. It’s a fairly robust application and is available for the major distros. So, let’s get started! (Also, click on the Wikipedia link above.) Install ‘smartmontools’:Īs I said above, we’ll be using ‘smartmontools’ to check the disk health with S.M.A.R.T. The best way to be prepared for it is to have spares and a good backup plan. Drive failure is real and you should be prepared for it. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve had drives fail within weeks of the warranty ending – and sometimes before the warranty ended. I have an external HDD that gets used constantly – and it’s well over a decade old. As I said in the opening paragraph, there’s a limit to how long your drives will last – but it will eventually and certainly fail.Īt the same time, there are probably many of us who have ‘magical’ drives. However, drives are perfectly happy failing without giving you any warning at all. It’s actually pretty accurate data – sorta… If it tells you there’s a problem, chances are good that drive health is an issue. We’ll be using “ S.M.A.R.T.” (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) and “ smartmontools” for this exercise. I periodically perform manual disk health checks. Heck, in theory, many systems are supposed to monitor disk health and alert you of impending failure (see some BIOS options), though I’ve personally had poor luck relying on automated alerts. This is a known limitation and there are ways to monitor disk health. You should plan on your drives failing because, given enough time or use, they will fail. Either hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), your storage media has a limited lifespan. Your storage media has a useful lifespan and the clock is ticking it from day one.
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