Linux get smart data

Introduction

Smartmontools is a set of applications that can test hard drives and read their hardware SMART statistics. Note: SMART data may not accurately predict future drive failure, however abnormal error rates may be an indication of possible hardware failure or data inconsistency.

This how to will help you to configure Smartmontools to do actions such as shut down the computer or send an e-mail when the disk is going to fail.

Prerequisites

Setting up

Installation

You can install the smartmontools package from the Synaptic Package Manager (see SynapticHowto), or by typing the following into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Checking a drive for SMART Capability

To ensure that your drive supports SMART, type:

where /dev/sda is your hard drive. This will give you brief information about your drive. The last two lines may look something like this:

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled

Enabling SMART

In the case that SMART is not enabled for your drive, you can enable it by typing:

sudo smartctl -s on /dev/sda

Testing a Drive

To find an estimate of the time it takes to conduct each test, type:

The most useful test is the extended test (long). You can initiate the test by typing:

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sda

Results

You can view a drive’s test statistics by typing:

sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda

To display detailed SMART information for an IDE drive, type:

To display detailed SMART information for a SATA drive, type:

sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sda

Note: This also works for IDE drives in new kernels that are being run through the SCSI stack and show up as /dev/sdX

Suggested application: GSmartControl

Take a look at GSmartControl. It’s a nice graphical frontend to smartctl; it shows all SMART values, and highlights those that indicate old age or impending failure, plus you may run tests on demand:

As usual, you may install it from Synaptic or running sudo apt-get install gsmartcontrol.

Advanced: Running as Smartmontools as a Daemon

You can run Smartmontools in the background and have it check drives and email when there are issues:

Open the file /etc/default/smartmontools with your favourite text editor. For example (using vim): sudo vim /etc/default/smartmontools. Uncomment the line start_smartd=yes.

How smartd is going to scan the disks and what it will do in case of errors is controlled by the daemon configuration file, /etc/smartd.conf. Again, use your favourite text editor to open this file. There should be one uncommented line, similar to:

DEVICESCAN -m root -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

• scan for all ATA/SCSI devices (DEVICESCAN). The rest of the file will be ignored;
• mail a report to the ‘root’ account in case of trouble (-m);
• but instead of the mail command, it will execute /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner and feed the report to it (-M exec program).

/usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner is a script that basically saves the report to a temporary file, and then runs anything it finds in /etc/smartmontools/run.d/; take a look there to understand what you already have (there should be a script that mails the report).

There are several -M directives that change when and how often reports are sent. You need to specify (-m something) in order to use them, even if you’re not sending any mail.

You may include some useful options:

DEVICESCAN -H -l error -l selftest -f -s (O/../../5/11|L/../../5/13|C/../../5/15) -m root -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

• check the SMART health status (-H);
• report increases in both SMART error logs (-l);
• check for failure of any Usage Attributes (-f);
• schedule an Offline Immediate Test every Friday at 11 am, a Long Self-Test every Friday at 1 pm, and a Conveyance Self-Test every Friday at 3 pm (-s) — see the smartd manual page for what these tests do so you can choose what suits you.

You may also replace DEVICESCAN with the path of the device which you’d like to be monitored (e.g. /dev/sda), and the daemon will only monitor this drive. You’ll need one such line for each device.

Actions in case of trouble

You’ll want to configure the actions smartd will take in case of trouble. If all you want is a notification shown on your desktop, skip to «Personal computer» below.

Most of the time, you only need to place a script in /etc/smartmontools/run.d/. Whenever smartd wants to send a report, it will execute smart-runner and the latter will run your script.

You have several variables available to your script (again, see the smartd manpage). These come from a test run:

SMARTD_MAILER=/usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner SMARTD_SUBJECT=SMART error (EmailTest) detected on host: XXXXX SMARTD_ADDRESS=root SMARTD_TFIRSTEPOCH=1267409738 SMARTD_FAILTYPE=EmailTest SMARTD_TFIRST=Sun Feb 28 21:45:38 2010 VET SMARTD_DEVICE=/dev/sda SMARTD_DEVICETYPE=sat SMARTD_DEVICESTRING=/dev/sda SMARTD_FULLMESSAGE=This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on: SMARTD_MESSAGE=TEST EMAIL from smartd for device: /dev/sda

Your script also has a temporary copy of the report available as «$1». It will be deleted after you finish but the same content is written to /var/log/syslog.

Personal computer

For a visual notification, you may just install smart-notifier. You will see a large popup with the report:

Alternatively, you may create a custom notification (bubble) as seen in other GNOME programs.

You will need to install the libnotify-bin package:

sudo aptitude install libnotify-bin

Now create a text file called 60notify in /etc/smartmontools/run.d:

sudo vi /etc/smartmontools/run.d/60notify

and add the following to the file:

DISPLAY=:0.0 notify-send --icon=important "Possible disk failure" "$SMARTD_DEVICE may have a problem"

(The DISPLAY=:0.0 part is a variable assignment that helps programs to locate your X server. It’s already set for your terminal, but the script lacks it since it is being run inside a different session).

Now give it execute permissions:

sudo chmod +x /etc/smartmontools/run.d/60notify

This will produce a nice libnotify bubble with a warning icon:

You may also experiment with Zenity:

DISPLAY=:0.0 zenity --text-info --filename="$1" --title="smartd: $SMARTD_DEVICE may have a problem"

Notice: Be very careful with these scripts as they are run under the root account.

Server

Here, you may wish to handle things differently. In this example we want to mail an admin and shut down the server. Comment out the line that contains DEVICESCAN, by adding # to the beginning of the line. Then, add this to the end of the file:

/dev/hda -H -l error -l selftest -f -s (O/../../5/11|L/../../5/13|C/../../5/15) \ -m admin@somewhere.com -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

(Be sure not to add any whitespace after the «\»)

Now, we are going to make the script which is going to shut down the computer *after* we mail the admin. Create a text file called 99shutdown in /etc/smartmontools/run.d and add the following to the file:

The number 99 at the start of the filename is to ensure that it is called last when smartd-runner runs. It will wait 40 seconds and then shut down the computer. Of course, you may customize this at will; you may not wish to turn off the server.

Now, it is time to start the daemon:

sudo service smartmontools start

Testing

If you want to test all these actions, add -M test after exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner and restart the daemon (sudo service smartmontools restart). When the daemon comes up, it will execute the script immediately with a test message. Notice: If you included the shutdown -h line, the script will shut down the computer as soon as the service starts. To fix this, you will have to start the computer in recovery mode and remove the -M test option from /etc/smartd.conf.

Note

Before running this, be sure to check that you have a «mail» command, and do a test first to your address. On my default Fiesty:

Make sure you have the ‘universe’ component enabled

bash: mail: command not found

Utility: Checking all disks at once

Note: Following the Gentoo Wiki I made a modified script which checks all the disk in /dev/disk/by-id/ Just invoke the script below as follows:

The script creates a directory named smart-logs and stores all the files there.

# Script by Meliorator. irc://irc.freenode.net/Meliorator # modified by Ranpha [ ! "$@" ] && echo "Usage: $0 type [type] [type]" [ ! -e smart-logs ] && mkdir smart-logs [ ! -d smart-logs ] && Can not create smart-logs dir && exit 1 a=0 for t in "$@"; do case "$t" in offline) l=error;; short|long) l=selftest;; *) echo $t is an unrecognised test type. Skipping. && continue esac for hd in /dev/disk/by-id/ata*; do r=$(( $(smartctl -t $t -d ata $hd | grep 'Please wait' | awk '') )) echo Check $hd - $t test in $r minutes [ $r -gt $a ] && a=$r done echo "Waiting $a minutes for all tests to complete" sleep $(($a))m for hd in /dev/disk/by-id/ata*; do smartctl -l $l -d ata $hd 2>&1 >> smart-logs/smart-$-$.log done done for i in ; do sleep .01 echo -n -e \\a done echo "All tests have completed"

(Remember to give execute permissions to the script with chmod +x smart.sh).

Testing drives behind MegaRAID

If /dev/sda is a MegaRAID device then straightforward execution of smartctl on it is not effective. It just returns an empty report for the controller itself. To get S.M.A.R.T. attributes of a drive behind the RAID controller you need to use the following command:

for i in ; do sudo smartctl -x /dev/sda -d megaraid,$i >>./OUTPUT; done

Examples of SMART reports

See large collection of smartctl reports for various hard drives here.

Smartmontools (последним исправлял пользователь vz-out 2019-12-24 11:07:49)

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How can I check the SMART status of a SSD or HDD on current versions of Ubuntu 14.04 through 20.04?

How can I check the SMART status of a drive under 14.04 and beyond? I’ve seen Checking HD SMART status on a fresh install but it doesn’t seem to apply under 14.04 and later.

3 Answers 3

Disks Utility

Launch the Disks Utility (If you don’t have it already, you can install Disks via the Software Center or open a terminal and issue the command sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility .

Select the drive of interest then click on the menu button at the upper right corner and choose SMART Data & self tests

Note that sometime between 18.10 and 20.04 the menu option has moved from the «hamburger menu» to the 3 vertical dots menu as shown below.

Types of self-tests

• Short: Checks the electrical and mechanical performance as well as the read performance of the disk. Electrical tests might include a test of buffer RAM, a read/write circuitry test, or a test of the read/write head elements. Mechanical test includes seeking and servo on data tracks. Scans small parts of the drive’s surface (area is vendor-specific and there is a time limit on the test). Checks the list of pending sectors that may have read errors, and it usually takes under two minutes.
• Long/extended: A longer and more thorough version of the short self-test, scanning the entire disk surface with no time limit. This test usually takes several hours, depending on the read/write speed of the drive and its size.
• Conveyance: Intended as a quick test to identify damage incurred during transporting of the device from the drive manufacturer to the computer manufacturer. Only available on ATA drives, and it usually takes several minutes.

How to interpret SMART-Attributes

The most important attribute in terms of failure rates is likely the 196 — Reallocated Sector Count, but considering Google research paper: _». failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever.» However, the majority of the drives (over 60%) in the study that failed did exhibit a smart failure, so as imperfect as it may be, it’s still valid indicator.

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