Quick HDD Health Check
Recently I have had to deal with two hardware disk failures in quick succession, which has led to two changes:
- A much increased pace of development on emu (more on that soon!).
- Taking a more programmatic and astute approach to keeping on eye on system health.
In order to facilitate the second point, I adapted a simple one-liner from this disk cloning with ddrescue tutorial in order to provide a quick and simple overview of the health of hard drives:
for i in $(ls /dev/sd[a-z]); do echo "=== $i ==="; \
sudo smartctl -a $i | egrep --color=never -i \
"reallocated_sector|ata error|serial|model|user capacity"; \
sudo smartctl -H $i &>/dev/null || sudo smartctl -H $i; echo; done;
Example output for a system with 5 drives, the fourth of which (/dev/sdd) is failing:
=== /dev/sda ===
Device Model: WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0
Serial Number: WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX
User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
=== /dev/sdb ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)
Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0
Serial Number: WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
=== /dev/sdc ===
Model Family: Western Digital Red (AF)
Device Model: WDC WD20EFRX-68EUZN0
Serial Number: WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
=== /dev/sdd ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)
Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0
Serial Number: WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.13.0-29-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 020 020 051 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 89263
=== /dev/sde ===
Model Family: HP 250GB SATA disk VB0250EAVER
Device Model: VB0250EAVER
Serial Number: XXXXXXXX
User Capacity: 250,059,350,016 bytes [250 GB]
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0
And here is the command in expanded form. Note that it runs the SMART health check, and will show the output is the test fails.
for i in $(ls /dev/sd[a-z]); do
echo "=== $i ==="
sudo smartctl -a $i | egrep --color=never \
-i "reallocated_sector|ata error|serial|model|user capacity"
sudo smartctl -H $i &>/dev/null || sudo smartctl -H $i
echo
done
Note also that this depends on the smartctl binary, which is probably not included in most default distributions. In Debian, you need to apt-get the smartmontools package:
sudo apt-get install smartmontools