Control and monitor SMART disks on Linux

Last updated: Oct 4, 2024

Intro

According to wikipedia, S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) that detects and reports on various indicators of drive reliability, with the intent of enabling the anticipation of hardware failures.

We'll see how to read SMART attributes using the smartctl tool on GNU/Linux systems.

Configuration

OS: Debian 12 Bookworm
smartmontools: 7.3

Installing

root@host:~# apt update && apt install smartmontools

Commands

Basic commands

Check if SMART is enabled:

root@host:~# smartctl -i /dev/<device>

Enable SMART:

root@host:~# smartctl -s on /dev/<device>

Print all SMART disk attributes:

root@host:~# smartctl -a /dev/<device>

Check criticals attributes, we can see in this example that the disk is dying:

root@host:~# smartctl -a /dev/<device> | grep -Ei "Reallocated|Spin.*Retry|SATA*Downshift|End-to-End|Reported.*Uncorrectable|Timeout|Reallocation|Current.*Pending|Uncorrect|TA.*Counter|Drive.*Life.*Protection"
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       408
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   075   075   000    Old_age   Always       -       25
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0

Check with RAID controller

Dell PERC Controller

Check disk number 8:

root@host:~# smartctl -a -d megaraid,8 /dev/sda

HP Smart Array Controller

Check disk number 1:

root@host:~# smartctl -a -d cciss,0 /dev/sda

Run Tests

Here we will see how to perform SMART self tests on disk.

Short test

Run tests that have a high probability of detecting device problems:

root@host:~# smartctl -t short /dev/<device>

Long test

Long check with complete disk surface examination:

root@host:~# smartctl -t long /dev/<device>

Conveyance test

Identifies if damage incurred during transportation of the device:

root@host:~# smartctl -t conveyance /dev/<device>

Check current test status

root@host:~# smartctl -l selftest /dev/<device>

Print results

root@host:~# smartctl -H /dev/<device>

Check if errors

root@host:~# smartctl -l selftest /dev/<device> root@host:~# smartctl -l error /dev/<device>

Computing

Music

Misc