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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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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 ... 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.
I should probably also mention that my NAS is huge and all those drive tests would take a lot of time -- the scrubs are already enough. 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. All total it's just under 100TB, so all the drives are 6TB or smaller. The every four months scrub plan is so each volume has it's own month, just to make it easier.
FWIW, though not germane 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. Kudos to Netgear for it being so, especially since the SAS chassis is not from Netgear. Of course, I did try it out with smaller arrays with scratch drives and had a full backup before I went all in. I was very happy that a factory default and restore was unnecessary.
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