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Recommended hard drive monitoring (Ubuntu server) options? (partizle.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I've had a home server for years, at first using Windows Server, then Unraid, and now using Ubuntu server. I've long known that I should keep a close eye on my spinning rust, but I never really knew the best way to have that monitoring quietly automated in the background, only sending me a message when something bad shows up. If it matters at all (I assume it doesn't) I am using ZFS on Ubuntu (but not using ZFS as root. It's mounted in e.g ~/user/storage. My primary drive is an SSD)

What are you all using for hard drive monitoring? What are you using for notifications and (generally) how are you linking those two together?

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[–] easeKItMAn 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SMART value monitoring helped me finding faulty drives, not only once. And drives are tested before adding to a production system.
Certainly system drives are separate from data drives. The latter can be perfectly monitored by SMART values.

[–] UFO64 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have done years of enterprise fault analysis, I promise you that SMART will happily tell you there is a problem at the same time you begin to experience data corruption. You might get lucky and catch and altered sector count spike up, or a temperature value go out of family, but in the field those things really suck at predictions.

If you want to know if a drive is healthy, track data corruption at the file system layer.

[–] easeKItMAn 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think you can’t track data corruption either because you will find out only when it occurred. Same is valid for SMART values as you correctly state. I believe it is a mix of using zfs, ECC and SMART monitoring.
https://phoenixnap.com/blog/data-corruption

Thanks for clarifying the intricacies connected to SMART monitoring.