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Forum Discussion
Disk health analysios
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. It may be a blunt instrument but it is better than nothing.
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Digital999 wrote:
Is there some equivalent for the ReadyNAS 314 and 312 product?
There are a several.
There is a built-in disk test that can be periodically scheduled or run on demand. That test uses the long SMART test that is built into modern disk drives. 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).
Also, the system does run the short SMART test on each drive daily. 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.
In addition to the disk tests, you can also schedule defrag, btrfs balance, and volume scrubs from the admin UI. 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.
One caveat - the ReadyNAS uses higher thresholds for reallocated and pending sectors than I am comfortable with. Unfortunately there is no way to set your own thresholds. So you do need to periodically look manually at the disk SMART stats.
Also, you should set up email alerts, so the ReadyNAS will notify you when it detects a problem.
Thank you once again for being a font of useful knowledge.
I am having trouble determeing how to look manually at the disk SMART stats. Is there an interface I am missing or ??
If you go to System > Volumes and hover your mouse over a disk you'll see the ATA error count.
If you download the logs (System > Logs > 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
- smart history log is definitely informative. i recently had a disk with reallocated sectors. i wish i knew about these details. definitely adding it to my to do's to check these twice a month atleast.
i run disk test, defrag, balance, scrub fortnightly. disk test takes the longest almost a day. is fortnightly a over kill and should i just run these once a month ?Unless you have a tremendous amount of data churn on your NAS, those are way more frequent than necessary. I run a balance monthly, a scrub every four months, and a drive test never. I believe that the access performed by the other processes is sufficient to cause SMART to kick in if there is a drive error. 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 often you do it.
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