SMART

Apparently, it's not to be trusted; see Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (Pinheiro, Weber and Barroso 2007).

Are my disks failing?

The one-line executive summary is available for supported disks via the -Hc option. grep for "^SMART overall" and verify PASSED as opposed to FAILING. If you're already FAILED, the command will generally fail in and of itself.

Hardware RAID Controllers

• Dell PERC -- See Linux on Dells. Example:

 [wopr](0) $ lsscsi -l
[0:0:32:0]   enclosu DP       BACKPLANE        1.06  -       
  state=running queue_depth=128 scsi_level=6 type=13 device_blocked=0 timeout=0
[0:2:0:0]    disk    DELL     PERC 6/i         1.11  /dev/sda
  state=running queue_depth=128 scsi_level=6 type=0 device_blocked=0 timeout=90
[wopr](0) $ 

See Also

• "Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART", Linux Journal 2004-01-01
• SMART on SATA drives is covered in more detail on the SATA page.