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