HDD health and maintenance. Smart Self-test logs

[rodp]

Hi All,

Firstly, I confess I am a little paranoid. but... How can I tell if my HDD is checking itself regularly? The table in the Disk Diagnostics section appears to be all offline / manual stuff but should it show up other more regular tests that the HDD does itself? (I could have sworn that (years ago) it used to show other (online) checks).

My manual process:

In the webif telnet window type smartctl -A /dev/sda to see info (in normal runtime it says it's /dev/sdb but presume in maintenance mode it's sda as the virtual usb drive thing isn't present).

Then to run a disk check
Option 1 - runtime - and from the webif telnet menu select fixdisk [realise this won't check all the HDD as some files / areas are locked but it's better than nothing]
Option 2 - offline - select maintenance mode, then from the webif telnet menu select fixdisk . The problem is that the box is always busy so I don't get round to doing that often enough.

What do other people do?

Thanks.


===============================

Web interface version: 1.5.3-3
Custom firmware version: 3.13 (build 4028)
Humax Version: 1.03.12 (kernel HDR_CFW_3.13)
Loader Version: a7.33


PS: When I paste in the info from webif it looks nicely formatted but when saving it gets corrupted - in the end I have to paste it in excel and then copy paste it hear. Why and what's the fix? I've had to resort to pics!


Disk Information

Disk Information
SMART Status	PASSED
Device Model	ST2000VX008-2E3164
Firmware Version	CV12
User Capacity	2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Sizes	512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate	5900 rpm
Form Factor	3.5 inches
ATA Version is	ACS-2, ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 3b
SATA Version is	SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is	Fri Jan 31 10:56:45 2025 GMT
SMART support is	Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is	Enabled

 

[Black Hole]

PS: When I paste in the info from webif it looks nicely formatted but when saving it gets corrupted - in the end I have to paste it in excel and then copy paste it hear. Why and what's the fix?

Yeah, it makes the post (and thread) almost unreadable. You're pasting HTML into something which runs on BBCode. It's made an attempt at converting, but incomplete. The fix it is to use screenshots (images), or use an external plain text/code editor to adjust the format. You can see the BBCode by opening a post for editing and then switching to BBCode instead of WYSIWYG:

How can I tell if my HDD is checking itself regularly?

It doesn't. What it does is monitor the read process (which might be a verify after a write), and see whether CRC correction was required or could not be reconciled at all. That's where your Raw_Read_Error_Rate comes from. If it decides to swap in a spare sector, it increments the Reallocated_Sector_Count.

Any actual scans have to be triggered off-line, Only file system consistency checks can be run without taking the HDD off-line. and that's not addressing the health of the HDD (although a crumbling HDD can to produce file system inconsistencies, if the errors affect the file system data structures rather than the actual data).

The problem is that the box is always busy so I don't get round to doing that often enough.

What do other people do?

This:

Option 2 - offline - select maintenance mode, then from the webif telnet menu select fixdisk

...but probably not often enough. Monthly should be plenty.

 

[JoeBloggs911]

Any actual scans have to be triggered off-line, Only file system consistency checks can be run without taking the HDD off-line. and that's not addressing the health of the HDD (although a crumbling HDD can to produce file system inconsistencies, if the errors affect the file system data structures rather than the actual data).


This:

...but probably not often enough. Monthly should be plenty.

I do it less often but this thread triggered me to run a scan. It took quite a while but finished apparently successfully (Exit code 0). However, on rebooting, I got the dreaded "Hard Disk must be formatted" popup. I switched off and tried again with the same result. Is there any way to bypass this?

 

[prpr]

You need to post the output of smartctl -a /dev/sda and the fixdisk process if you want an opinion.

 

[JoeBloggs911]

You need to post the output of smartctl -a /dev/sda and the fixdisk process if you want an opinion.

The disk seems to be fried. I restarted and this time the "Reformat disk" popup didn't appear. The box displayed all channels but had no response to "Media" button and no ftp access. I tried an HTTP connect from the browser and got

"No internal disk found.
To install the full web interface and supporting packages a suitably formatted internal hard disk must be present and none was detected."

A link to the telnet menu worked. I tried the maintenance mode option, but the reboot again stuck on the "Format disk" popup. I suspect the worst.