Lead Image © Sk Design, Fotolia.com
SMART storage device monitoring
Distress Signals
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system for storage devices that provides information about the status of a device and allows for the running of self-tests. Administrators can use it to check on the status of their storage devices and periodically run self-tests to determine the state of the device.
IBM was the first company to add some monitoring and information capability to their drives in 1992. Other vendors followed suit, and Compaq led an effort to standardize the approach to monitoring drive health and reporting it. This push for standardization led to S.M.A.R.T. [1] (Although S.M.A.R.T. is the correct abbreviation, it's not nearly as easy to type, so I will be using SMART throughout the remainder of the article.)
Over time, SMART capability has been added to many drives, including PATA, SATA, and the many varieties of SCSI, SAS, and solid-state drives, as well as NVM Express (commonly referred to as NVMe) and even eMMC drives. The standard provides that the drives measure the appropriate health parameters and then make the results available for the operating system or other monitoring tools. However, each drive vendor is free to decide which parameters are to be monitored and their thresholds (i.e., the points at which the drive has "failed"). Note that I use "drive" as a generic term for a storage device in this article.
For a drive to be considered "SMART," all it has to have is the ability to signal between the internal drive sensors and the host computer. Nothing in the standard defines what sensors are in the drive or how the data is exposed to the user. However, at the lowest level, SMART provides a simple binary bit of information – the drive is OK or the drive has failed. This bit of information is called the SMART status. Many times the output DISK FAILING doesn't indicate that the drive
...
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy ADMIN Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
SMART Devices
Most storage devices have SMART capability, but can it help you predict failure? We look at ways to take advantage of this built-in monitoring technology with the smartctl utility from the Linux smartmontools package.
-
S.M.A.R.T., smartmontools, and drive monitoring
Modern drives use S.M.A.R.T. (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) to gather information and run self-tests. Smartmontools is a Linux tool for interacting with the S.M.A.R.T. features of drives. But is S.M.A.R.T. the best way to predict impending drive doom? -
Predicting Drive Doom
Modern drives use S.M.A.R.T. (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) to gather information and run self-tests. Smartmontools is a Linux tool for interacting with the S.M.A.R.T. features of drives. But is S.M.A.R.T. the best way to predict impending drive doom?
-
When I/O workloads don't perform
Every now and then, you find yourself in a situation where you expect better performance from your data storage drives. Either they once performed very well and one day just stopped, or they came straight out of the box underperforming. We explore a few of the reasons why this might happen. -
A closer look at hard drives
We continue our exploration of the world of hard drives – both solid state and spinning varieties.