Comments on: Get SMART http://www.alstongrove.com/posts/24 Welcome to the throes of my thoughts Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:26:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Rob http://www.alstongrove.com/posts/24#comment-19 Rob Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://maize.dhs.org/wp/?p=24#comment-19 This sounds like a total necessity for all hard drives these days. When you've got GIGABYTES of data all residing on a single hard drive, a HD failure can wipe out your entire electronic world. Granted, when we were all running 800MB hard drives, a HD failure would wipe you out just the same. This begs the question that you eluded to ... why isn't this technology enabled by default? Question: Does this then keep you from making a RAID array? Is it necessary now that you can intimately monitor the health of your hard drives? This sounds like a total necessity for all hard drives these days. When you’ve got GIGABYTES of data all residing on a single hard drive, a HD failure can wipe out your entire electronic world. Granted, when we were all running 800MB hard drives, a HD failure would wipe you out just the same.

This begs the question that you eluded to … why isn’t this technology enabled by default?

Question: Does this then keep you from making a RAID array? Is it necessary now that you can intimately monitor the health of your hard drives?

]]> By: Eric http://www.alstongrove.com/posts/24#comment-20 Eric Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://maize.dhs.org/wp/?p=24#comment-20 If you use software RAID, then each disk can still be monitored with SMART. With hardware RAID solutions, you would probably need modified SMART monitoring software. The SmartMon tools were modified to talk to disks connected to a 3ware RAID card. Even with redundancy provided by RAID, I would still want to know if one of the disks are about to fail. One thing that scares me about RAID is that if something bad happens and you are in a data recovery situation, the data format makes it extremely difficult to scan the disk looking for file systems. I still haven't decided if I want to run RAID or just use extra disks to archive data. Right now, I'm leaning towards the latter. If you use software RAID, then each disk can still be monitored with SMART. With hardware RAID solutions, you would probably need modified SMART monitoring software. The SmartMon tools were modified to talk to disks connected to a 3ware RAID card.

Even with redundancy provided by RAID, I would still want to know if one of the disks are about to fail. One thing that scares me about RAID is that if something bad happens and you are in a data recovery situation, the data format makes it extremely difficult to scan the disk looking for file systems. I still haven’t decided if I want to run RAID or just use extra disks to archive data. Right now, I’m leaning towards the latter.

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