What is S.M.A.R.T.?
S.M.A.R.T. –for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology— is a technology embedded in storage devices like hard disk drives or SSDs and whose goal is to monitor their health status.
In practice, S.M.A.R.T. will monitor several disk parameters during normal drive operations, like the number of reading errors, the drive startup times or even the environmental condition. Moreover, S.M.A.R.T. and can also perform on-demand tests on the drive.
Ideally, S.M.A.R.T. would allow anticipating predictable failures such as those caused by mechanical wearing or degradation of the disk surface, as well as unpredictable failures caused by an unexpected defect. Since drives usually don’t fail abruptly, S.M.A.R.T. gives an option for the operating system or the system administrator to identify soon-to-fail drives so they can be replaced before any data loss occurs.
What isn’t S.M.A.R.T.?
All that seems wonderful. However, S.M.A.R.T. is not a crystal ball. It cannot predict with 100% accuracy a failure nor, on the other hand, guarantee a drive will not fail without any early warning. At best, S.M.A.R.T. should be used to estimate the likeliness of a failure.
Given the statistical nature of failure prediction, the S.M.A.R.T. technology particularly interests company using a large number of storage units, and field studies have been conducted to estimate the accuracy of S.M.A.R.T. reported issues to anticipate disk replacement needs in data centers or server farms.
In 2016, Microsoft and The Pennsylvania State University conducted a study focussing on SSDs.
According to that study, it appears some S.M.A.R.T. attributes are good indicators of imminent failure. The paper specifically mentions:
A typical health report on a solid state drive. Beyond the Self-test log, there are two values in the output to be examined: PowerOnHours - how many hours the drive has been powered on. You can save your SSD software to an external USB to run the software whenever you require it. It will tell you about the complexities on the drive and help you better the performance. It is free of cost and portable as well. CrystalDiskInfo It is a free software that is used to check the health of your SSD. SSD Health Check shows important insights to the state of your SSD. Features Expected lifetime until death in% S.M.A.R.T. Status Short details Unexpected power losses Actual. SSD Manager Description: Kingston® SSD Manager is an application that provides users with the ability to monitor and manage various aspects of their Kingston® Solid State Drive. With Kingston® SSD Manager you will be able to: Monitor drive health, status, and disk usage.
Is there an hp tool for monitoring ssd health? I installed an hp S700 Pro SSD and would like to track health of the drive over time. I have found that others have health monitors for these but cannot find a similar hp feature. If not, how do I track the condition of the drive? All disk drives installed on your computer are listed at the top of the app. Click the SSD you want to check the health of and inspect the rating under 'Health Status'. A good rating will say 'Good' followed by a health percentage, where 100% is the best rating possible.
Reallocated (Realloc) Sector Count:
While the underlying technology is radically different, that indicator seems as significant in the SSD world than it was in the hard drive world. Worth mentioning because of wear-leveling algorithms used in SSDs, when several blocks start failing, chances are many more will fail soon.Program/Erase (P/E) fail count:
This is a symptom of a problem with the underlying flash hardware where the drive was unable to clear or store data in a block. Because of imperfections in the manufacturing process, few such errors can be anticipated. However, flash memories have a limited number of clear/write cycles. So, once again, a sudden increase in the number of events might indicate the drive has reached its end of life limit, and we can anticipate many more memory cells to fail soon.CRC and Uncorrectable errors (“Data Error”):
These events can be caused either by storage error or issues with the drive’s internal communication link. This indicator takes into account both corrected errors (thus without any issue reported to the host system) as well as uncorrected errors (thus blocks the drive has reported being unable to read to the host system). In other words, correctable errors are invisible to the host operating system, but they nevertheless impact the drive performances since data has to be corrected by the drive firmware, and a possible sector relocation might occur.SATA downshift count:
Because of temporary disturbances, issues with the communication link between the drive and the host, or because of internal drive issues, the SATA interface can switch to a lower signaling rate. Downgrading the link below the nominal link rate has the obvious impact on the observed drive performances. Selecting a lower signaling rate is not uncommon, especially on older drives. So this indicator is most significant when correlated with the presence of one or several of the preceding ones.
According to the study, 62% of the failed SSD showed at least one of the above symptoms. However, if you reverse that statement, that also means 38% of the studied SSDs failed without showing any of the above symptoms. The study did not mention though if the failed drives have exhibited any other S.M.A.R.T. reported failure or not. So this cannot be directly compared to the 36% failure-without-prior-notice mentioned for hard drives in the Google paper.
The Microsoft/Pennsylvania State University paper does not disclose the exact drive models studied, but according to the authors, most of the drives are coming from the same vendor spanning several generations.
The study noticed significant differences in reliability between the different models. For example, the “worst” model studied exhibits a 20% failure rate nine months after the first relocation error and up to 36% failure rate nine months after the first occurrence of data errors. The “worst” model also happens to be the older drive generation studied in the paper.
On the other hand, for the same symptoms, the drives belonging to the youngest generation of devices shows only 3% and 20% respectively failure rate for the same errors. It is hard to tell if those figures can be explained by improvements in the drive design and manufacturing process, or if this is simply an effect of drive aging.
Most interestingly, and I gave some possible reasons earlier, the paper mentions that, rather than the raw value, this is a sudden increase in the number of reported errors that should be considered as an alarming indicator:
“”” There is a higher likelihood of the symptoms preceding SSD failures, with an intense manifestation and rapid progression preventing their survivability beyond a few months “””
In other words, one occasional S.M.A.R.T. reported error is probably not to be considered as a signal of imminent failure. However, when a healthy SSD starts reporting more and more errors, a short- to mid-term failure has to be anticipated.
But how to know if your hard drive or SSD is healthy? Either to satisfy your curiosity or because you want to start monitoring your drives closely, it is time now to introduce the smartctl monitoring tool:
Using smartctl to Monitor Status of your SSD in Linux
There are ways to list disks in Linux but to monitor the S.M.A.R.T. status of your disk, I suggest the smartctl tool, part of the smartmontool package (at least on Debian/Ubuntu).
smartctl is a command line tool, but this is perfect, especially if you want to automate data collection, on your servers especially.
The first step when using smartctl is to check if your disk has S.M.A.R.T. enabled and is supported by the tool:
As you can see, my laptop internal hard drive indeed has S.M.A.R.T. capabilities, and S.M.A.R.T. support is enabled. So, what now about the S.MA.R.T. status? Are there some errors recorded?
Reporting “all SMART information about the disk” is the job of the -a option:
Understanding the output of smartctl command
That is a lot of information and it is not always easy to interpret those data. The most interesting part is probably the one labeled as “Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds”. It reports various statistics gathered by the S.M.A.R.T. device and let you compare those value (current or all-time worst) with some vendor-defined threshold.
For example, here is how my disk reports relocated sectors:
You can see this a “pre-fail” attribute. That just means that attribute is corresponding to anomalies. So, if that attribute exceeds the threshold, that could be an indicator of imminent failure. The other category is “Old_age” for attributes corresponding to “normal wearing” attributes.
The last field (here “3”) is corresponding the raw value for that attribute as reported by the drive. Usually, this number has a physical significance. Here, this is the actual number of relocated sectors. However, for other attributes, it could be a temperature in degrees Celcius, a time in hours or minutes, or the number of times the drive has encountered a specific condition.
In addition to the raw value, a S.M.A.R.T. enabled drive must report “normalized” values (fields value, worst and threshold). These values are normalized in the range 1-254 (0-255 for the threshold). The disk firmware performs that normalization using some internal algorithm. Moreover, different manufacturers may normalize the same attribute differently. Most values are reported as a percentage, the higher being the best, but this is not mandatory. When a parameter is lower or equal to the manufacturer supplied threshold, the disk is said to have failed for that attribute. With all the reserves mentioned in the first part of that article, when a “pre-fail” attribute has failed, presumably a disk failure is imminent.
As a second example, let’s examine the “seek error rate”:
Actually, and this is a problem with S.M.A.R.T. reporting, the exact meaning of each value is vendor-specific. In my case, Seagate is using a logarithmic scale to normalize the value. So “71” means roughly one error for 10 million seeks (10 to the 7.1st power). Amusingly enough, the all-time worst was one error for 1 million seeks (10 to the 6.0th power). If I interpret that correctly, that means my disk heads are more accurately positioned now than they were in the past. I did not follow that disk closely, so this analysis is subject to caution. Maybe the drive just needed some running-in period when it was initially commissioned? Unless this is a consequence of mechanical parts wearing, and thus opposing less friction today? In any case, and whatever the reason is, this value is more a performance indicator than a failure early warning. So that does not bother me a lot.
Besides that, and three suspects errors recorded about six months ago, that drive appears in surprisingly good conditions (according to S.M.A.R.T.) for a stock laptop drive that was powered on for more than 1100 days (26423 hours):
Out of curiosity, I ran the same test on a much more recent laptop equipped with an SSD:
The first thing to notice, even if that device is S.M.AR.T. enabled, it is not in the smartctl database. That won’t prevent the tool to gather data from the SSD, but it will not be able to report the exact meaning of the different vendor-specific attributes:
This is typically the output you can expect for a brand new SSD. Even if, because of the lack of normalization or metainformation for vendor-specific data, many attributes are reported as “Unknown_SSD_Attribute.” I may only hope future versions of smartctl will incorporate data relative to that particular drive model in the tool database, so I could more accurately identify possible issues.
Test your SSD in Linux with smartctl
Until now we have examined the data collected by the drive during its normal operations. However, the S.M.A.R.T. protocol also supports several “self-tests” commands to launch diagnosis on demand.
Unless explicitly requested, the self-tests can run during normal disk operations. Since both the test and the host I/O requests will compete for the drive, the disk performances will degrade during the test. The S.M.A.R.T. specification specifies several kinds of self-test. The most important are:
Short self-test (-t short)
This test will check for the electrical and mechanical performances as well as the read performances of the drive. The short self-test typically only requires few minutes to complete (2 to 10 usually).Extended self-test (-t long)
This test takes one or two orders of magnitude longer to complete. Usually, this is a more in-depth version of the short self-test. In addition, that test will scan the entire disk surface for data errors with no time limit. The test duration will be proportional to the disk size.Conveyance self-test (-t conveyance)
/microsoft-access-database-for-mac.html. this test suite is designed as a relatively quick way to check for possible damage incurred during transporting of the device.
Here are examples taken from the same disks as above. I let you guess which is which:
The test has now being stated. Let’s wait until completion to show the outcome:
Let’s do now the same test on my other disk:
Once again, sleep for two minutes and display the test outcome:
Interestingly, in that case, it appears both the drive and the computer manufacturers seems to have performed some quick tests on the disk (at lifetime 0h and 12h). I was definitely much less concerned with monitoring the drive health myself. So, since I am running some self-tests for that article, let’s start an extended test to so how it goes:
Apparently, this time we will have to wait much longer than for the short test. So let’s do it:
In that latter case, pay special attention to the different outcomes obtained with the short and extended tests, even if they were performed one right after the other. Well, maybe that disk is not that healthy after all! An important thing to notice is the test will stop after the first read error. So if you want an exhaustive diagnosis of all read errors, you will have to continue the test after each error. I encourage you to take a look at the very well written smartctl(8) manual page for the more information about the options -t select,N-max and -t select,cont for that:
Conclusion
Definitely, S.M.A.R.T. reporting is a technology you can add to your tool chest to monitor your servers disk health. In that case, you should also take a look at the S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitoring Daemon smartd(8) that could help you automate monitoring through syslog reporting.
Given the statistical nature of failure prediction, I am a little bit less convinced however than aggressive S.M.A.R.T. monitoring is of great benefit on a personal computer. Finally, don’t forget whatever is its technology, a drive will fail— and we have seen earlier, in one-third of the case, it will fail without prior notices. So nothing will replace RAIDand offline backups to ensure your data integrity!
This article was written by Sylvain Leroux
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Hard drives are slowly being replaced with SSDs now. Unfortunately, SSDs have a limited life that is something that scares users from investing in expensive hardware. However, SSDs do have a limited life, it is still likely that you buy a new system before you have to replace your SSD. That said, it is still a great idea to keep an eye on your SSD health. In this article, we are going to talk about SSD Health check on Windows 10 – Tutorial. Let’s begin!
SSDs are gradually intruding into the HDD market and also replacing the role of regular hard disks in laptops and high-end desktops as well. Solid State Devices are offering high performance as compared to traditional spinning hard disks. This flash-based memory device is consuming less battery power to read and write data with really high-speed that guarantees more battery life for your laptops.
The SSD system will boot in seconds and also be ready to start work in seconds. If you have applications installed on SSD, the drive loads your applications faster and copies Gigabytes of data within just a few seconds. SSDs are offering high performance, high-speed, and as well as less power consumption. Since this is a new technology, still SSDs are lagging behind hard disks in terms of lifespan and reliability as well.
SSD health depends on how much data that you have written to it. You can write more than 500TB of data to an SSD before it fails. Some can last even longer, that actually depends on the brand you buy.
SSD Health
There are many tools, both paid and free, that tell you how healthy your SSD is. We recommend using Crystal Disk Mark, or giving Open Hardware Monitor a try as well. There’s another application called SSDLife which has a Pro and Free version but it seems the free version cannot be downloaded from the developer’s website. You actually have to get it off Softpedia.
Crystal Disk Mark SSD health check
Download Crystal Disk Mark and then install it. Run the application and it will tell you the current state of your SSD. If the app tells you it’s ‘Good’ then you don’t have anything to worry about. In many cases, where the SSD supports it, you will also be able to see a percentage for its health and how much data that you’ve written to it so far. My SSD does not support it but it shows to be in good health as per this app.
If you want a real benchmarking tool to test your hard disk, then Crystal Disk Mark is the right tool. This tool can test your Hard Disk in Sequential Reads or Writes, Random Reads/Writes, and QD32 Modes. You can also tweak the zoom ratio, and font scale, type, and face in the software as well. This actually makes it one of the most visually intriguing SSD health tools.
If you need to compare your SSD performance, Read/Write speed in random and sequential along with other manufacturers, or want to confirm your SSD is offering the same performance manufacturer specified. Then this is going to be the best open-source tool to check the disk or multiple disks based on their read-write performance.
Ssd Health Check 1.5 Inch
Crystal Disk Mark also works on Windows XP or later and Windows Server 2003 or above versions as well. You can easily monitor the peak and real-time performance profile along with the software. If you are using Crystal Disk Mark in order to measure Network Drive, make sure to run it without Administrator rights. If the benchmark test fails on your SSD health check, enable the Administrator rights, and then run it again.
Features:
- SSD Details are (Firmware, Supported Features, Power On Hours, etc.)
- SSD benchmarking and also monitor performance.
- Compare SSD performance with standard data.
- Also allows customizing panel appearance
- Compatible with Windows computers only
- Measure performance of Network Drive
Open Hardware Monitor
Download and then install Open Hardware Monitor. Run the application and expand your SSD from the list. Under Levels, the application will tell you how much of your SSD’s life is left. Mine has 96% of its life left but I have only had my SSD for a little over a year so it sounds to have depreciated more than is normal.
SSDLife SSD health check
You can also buy SSDLife Pro, or you can try the free version from Softpedia. The Pro version is not very expensive so if you like the free version, then you might need to look at buying the full one. Download, install and then run the app. It will then tell you how your SSD is doing so far. The agreement is that mine is healthy.
SSDs help your system run faster and unless you’ve used one in your system, then it’s hard to explain or truly appreciate how great it is. The technology has improved and is still improving so if you’re not willing to invest in one now, then you should definitely consider doing so in the next coming years. They will be more affordable and their lifespan will also have improved.
SSDLife is checked with most of the SSD drives in order to check compatibility. This SSD tool can also work with most SSD manufacturers like Kingston, OCZ, Apple MacBook Air built-in SSD. You can get comprehensive information like its total throughput, the amount of free disk space, and much more using the software. There is also a health bar in SSDLife as well. This visually represents the state of the SSD drive, and also it is an estimated lifetime.
The intuitive SSD diagnostic tool actually gives you access to all S.M.A.R.T. parameters too. But, the free version keeps reports only for 30 days and does not show S.M.A.R.T. attributes either. You have to upgrade to SSDLife Professional version for unlocking all the features.
Features:
Ssd Health Check 1.5 Hp
- Drive details (Trim support, Firmware, etc.)
- Check SSD health status
- Access to S.M.A.R.T. parameters
- Lifetime calculation of SSD
- Supports most of the SSD Drives
- 30-day free trial available
Smartmono tools SSD health check
The smartmontools package consist of two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) in order to control and monitor your hard disk. This tool is actually offering the real-time monitoring of your Hard Disk. Smartmonotools can analyze and also warn you about potential disk degradation and failure.
Smartmontools supports ATA/ATAPI/SATA-3 to -8 disks and SCSI disks and tape devices as well. This disk tool can run on Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Cygwin, QNX, eComStation, Windows, and runs from a Live CD as well. The software also works perfectly with SATA drives under Linux 2.4 as well as 2.6 kernels for the SSD test.
You can also monitor your SSD status with Smartmontools easily. You may want to add a “-d sat” or “-d ata” option on the command line for smartctl. And you can also do it in the /etc/smartd.conf file. This will then help to treat the drive with a SCSI device name as an ATA disk. Likewise, the “-d sat” command instructs the software in order to assume a SATL is in place. This also makes it one of the most reliable SSD health tools for accurate readings.
Features:
- Real-time SSD performance monitoring
- Disk failure and degradation alert
- Supports all PC platforms
- Support most of the SSD Drives
- Works with Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels
- Options to tweak commands for better SSD test
Ssd Health Check 1.5 Oz
Conclusion
Ssd Health Check 1.5 Month
Alright, That was all Folks! I hope you guys like this ssd health check article and find it helpful to you. Give us your feedback on it. Also if you guys have further queries related to this article. Then let us know in the comments section below. We will get back to you shortly.
Have a Great Day!
Also See: Windows 10 Show Hidden Files – Full Tutorial