I’ve had a home server for years, at first using Windows Server, then Unraid, and now using Ubuntu server. I’ve long known that I should keep a close eye on my spinning rust, but I never really knew the best way to have that monitoring quietly automated in the background, only sending me a message when something bad shows up. If it matters at all (I assume it doesn’t) I am using ZFS on Ubuntu (but not using ZFS as root. It’s mounted in e.g ~/user/storage. My primary drive is an SSD)
What are you all using for hard drive monitoring? What are you using for notifications and (generally) how are you linking those two together?
SMART value monitoring helped me finding faulty drives, not only once. And drives are tested before adding to a production system.
Certainly system drives are separate from data drives. The latter can be perfectly monitored by SMART values.
Have done years of enterprise fault analysis, I promise you that SMART will happily tell you there is a problem at the same time you begin to experience data corruption. You might get lucky and catch and altered sector count spike up, or a temperature value go out of family, but in the field those things really suck at predictions.
If you want to know if a drive is healthy, track data corruption at the file system layer.
I think you can’t track data corruption either because you will find out only when it occurred. Same is valid for SMART values as you correctly state.
I believe it is a mix of using zfs, ECC and SMART monitoring. https://phoenixnap.com/blog/data-corruption
Thanks for clarifying the intricacies connected to SMART monitoring.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
SMART value monitoring helped me finding faulty drives, not only once. And drives are tested before adding to a production system.
Certainly system drives are separate from data drives. The latter can be perfectly monitored by SMART values.
Have done years of enterprise fault analysis, I promise you that SMART will happily tell you there is a problem at the same time you begin to experience data corruption. You might get lucky and catch and altered sector count spike up, or a temperature value go out of family, but in the field those things really suck at predictions.
If you want to know if a drive is healthy, track data corruption at the file system layer.
I think you can’t track data corruption either because you will find out only when it occurred. Same is valid for SMART values as you correctly state. I believe it is a mix of using zfs, ECC and SMART monitoring.
https://phoenixnap.com/blog/data-corruption
Thanks for clarifying the intricacies connected to SMART monitoring.