smartctl is your friend when it comes to evaluating a disk drive health.
Keep in mind, though, that SMART is not fool proof. Some disk damage may
not be caught by SMART, but if SMART says your drive is damaged, then it
probably is.
First, check the overall health status ((replace /dev/sda with the
approriate disk device in your case):
# smartctl -H /dev/sda
will give you a PASSED or FAILED test. Note that I've seen disks that
make helicopter sounds and still have a PASSED status. This is not very
accurate, but the attributes do give interesting values, like the power
cycle count, or overall power on hours.
A much better overall indicator is the error log. A non-empty error log
is a huge read flag:
# smartctl -l error /dev/sda
Finally, the best thing to do is to have the disk firmware run a
self-test. There are two types: short (a few minutes) and long (maybe an
hour). Run a short test first, then a long test if that passes, to be sure:
# smartctl -t short /dev/sda
Then monitor the result with
# smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
To run the long test,
# smartctl -t long /dev/sda
Hope this helps.
Denis
(works in storage)
On 03/15/2017 06:37 PM, Bob Goodwin wrote:
I just salvaged the hard drive from an abandoned DirectTV box that
"smoked." Note: With their approval ...
I'm just trying to determine how much confidence I can have in it. It
was interesting to see that it was formatted Linux XFS initially. I
reworked it with gparted and ext4 to test it. Presently it is in a USB
adapter connected to a USB2 port on this computer. It appears to have
been running for 2.6+ years, I have a number of drives with at least
that much time on them and they are still going.
Any thoughts on making sense of smrtctl are appreciated.
Thanks,
Bob
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.9.13-201.fc25.x86_64]
(local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,
www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Pipeline HD 5900.2
Device Model: ST3500312CS
Serial Number: 5VV9WJQQ
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0490e4346
Firmware Version: SC13
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate: 5900 rpm
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is: SATA 2.6, 3.0 Gb/s (current: 1.5 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Wed Mar 15 13:01:12 2017 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 074 074 000 Old_age
Always - 23096
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail
Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age
Always - 85
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