Disk health analysios

Question

On a Windows system there is a unility called Crystal Disk Info -- it provides a first level analysis of the health of your hard drive.&nbsp; It may be a blunt instrument but it is better than nothing.
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Is there some equivalent for the ReadyNAS 314 and 312 product?

StephenB · Answer

Digital999&nbsp;wrote:
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Is there some equivalent for the ReadyNAS 314 and 312 product?

There are a several.
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There is a built-in disk test that can be periodically scheduled or run on demand.&nbsp; That test uses the long SMART test that is built into modern disk drives.&nbsp; You will get a pass/fail indication in the main log, and you can look at the detailed SMART stats in the full system log zip file (downloaded from the admin web ui).
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Also, the system does run the short SMART test on each drive daily.&nbsp; The results aren't reported explicitly in the web ui (unless a drive fails of course), but you can still see the detailed SMART stats in the logs.
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In addition to the disk tests, you can also schedule defrag, btrfs balance, and volume scrubs from the admin UI.&nbsp; If you are using RAID redundancy, the scrub also exercises the disks (reading or writing every sector on the data volume), so it serves as a disk test.
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One caveat - the ReadyNAS uses higher thresholds for reallocated and pending sectors than I am comfortable with.&nbsp; Unfortunately there is no way to set your own thresholds.&nbsp; So you do need to periodically look manually at the disk SMART stats.
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Also, you should set up email alerts, so the ReadyNAS will notify you when it detects a problem.

mdgm-ntgr · Answer

If you go to System &gt; Volumes and hover your mouse over a&nbsp;disk you'll see the ATA error count.

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If you download the logs (System &gt; Logs &gt; Download logs) you can see current SMART stats in disk_info.log and you can see the history of changes in key values in smart_history.log

Sandshark · Answer

Unless you have a tremendous amount of data churn on your&nbsp;NAS, those are way more frequent than necessary.&nbsp; I run a balance monthly, a scrub every four months, and a drive test never.&nbsp; I believe that the access performed by the other processes is sufficient to cause SMART to kick in if there is a drive error.&nbsp; The monthly balance may still be more often than necessary, but it doesn't tie up the NAS much and it runs in less time the more&nbsp;often you do it.

StephenB · Answer

Sandshark&nbsp;wrote:
I run a balance monthly, a scrub every four months, and a drive test never.&nbsp; I believe that the access performed by the other processes is sufficient to cause SMART to kick in if there is a drive error.&nbsp; The monthly balance may still be more often than necessary, but it doesn't tie up the NAS much and it runs in less time the more&nbsp;often you do it.

The scrub should also access every sector in the volume, so I agree it also serves as a disk diagnostic.
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Personally I run each of the maintenance functions (including the disk test) every three months (on a staggered schedule).
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As far as the frequency needed for balancing, one clue is the amount of time the balance takes.&nbsp; If it takes a long time, then that is a clue that you should increase the frequency.&nbsp; Mine generally take less than 5 minutes - which suggests that I could lower the frequency.

Sandshark · Answer

Sandshark&nbsp;wrote:I run a ... drive test never.&nbsp; I believe that the access performed by the other processes is sufficient to cause SMART to kick in if there is a drive error.I should probably also mention that my NAS is huge and all those drive tests would take a lot of time&nbsp; -- the scrubs are already enough.&nbsp; My main chassis is a 12-bay rack mount that contains two RAID5 volumes moved from an RN516 and an EDA500 and I also have a 24-bay SAS expansion with another RAID5 from another eSATA expansion and a newer 12-drive RAID6.&nbsp; All total it's just under 100TB, so all the drives are 6TB or smaller.&nbsp; The every four months scrub plan is so each volume has it's own month, just to make it easier.&nbsp;FWIW, though not germane&nbsp;to this discussion, I want to mention that the migration from the RN516 and two eSATA expansions to the new rack-mount monstrocity was seamless. I moved the drives and powered up, and all went without a hitch.&nbsp; Kudos to Netgear for it being so, especially since the SAS chassis is not from Netgear.&nbsp; Of course, I did try it out with smaller arrays with scratch drives and had a full backup before I went all in.&nbsp; I was very happy that a factory default and restore was unnecessary.

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Disk health analysios

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