Checking Your Disk Health with SmartMon
SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a useful tool which is likely built into your hard drives that you already use on your server. ClearBOX typically uses SMART hard drives and a diagnosis of your drives using this technology is often a requirement to receive an RMA.
SMART can tell you if your hard drive is failing even before it dies and destroys your data. If you can get your data and SMART says that your drive is failed, then this is called 'predictive failure' and most manufacturers will replace a drive under warranty even if it is only in 'predictive failure'.
Installing SMART Monitoring Tools
Run the following from command line to install the SMART monitoring tools for Linux:
yum -y install smartmontools
Some versions of ClearBOX come with disk utilities which allow you to run these tools from your compact flash. These may be in the Utilities section of the boot menu.
Running smartctl
Identify your hard disks.
fdisk -l
This may give a lot of data but what you are looking for is your physical disk drives. They are the ones that start with /dev/sdX or /dev/hdX. On my system I have two drives:
Disk /dev/sda: 8012 MB, 8012390400 bytes Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
I know that my 8Gig device is a Compact flash and my 250 Gig device is my hard disk that has SMART capability.
For a quick look run the following:
smartctl -a /dev/sdb |grep overall-health
If you want to look over all the extended nerdy info try the following:
smartctl -a /dev/sdb