Using Smartmontools on Ubuntu Server

04 Nov 2024

Installation

As mentioned before the smartmontools package is available in the repositories of all the major Linux distributions, therefore all we have to do to install it, is to use our favorite package manager. If you are running on Debian or one of its derivatives, like Ubuntu or Mint, for example, you can run:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install smartmontools

On recent versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora we can use dnf:

$ sudo dnf install smartmontools

If Archlinux is your favorite distribution, you can use pacman:

$ sudo pacman -S smartmontools

Checking if SMART is enabled

Let’s become familiar with the smartctl utility. The first thing we want to check is if S.M.A.R.T support is active on the device. To perform this operation we can run the smartctl utility with the -i option (short for --info):

$ sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda

The output of the command is the following:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital Red Device Model: WDC WD10EFRX-68FYTN0 LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 20c672def Firmware Version: 82.00A82 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated) SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Thu Sep 24 18:13:19 2020 CEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Disabled

We can see that basic information are displayed such as the device family, model, sector sizes, etc. What interests us the most, however is the content of the last two lines. From there we can see that the device has SMART capabilities and that, in this case, SMART support is disabled. What if we want to enable it? All we have to do is to run smartctl with the -s option, using “on” as argument:

=== START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION === SMART Enabled.

Getting familiar with smartctl

To get all the available SMART information about a storage device, we can launch the utility with the -a option (short for -all) and of course pass the path of the device we want to check as the last argument of the command. Suppose we want to check the current status of the /dev/sda device; we would run:

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

The command above produces a lot of output. Among the other things, we can see the status of various SMART parameters:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 135 125 021 Pre-fail Always - 4216 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 941 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 085 085 000 Old_age Always - 11285 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 446 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 108 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 199 199 000 Old_age Always - 4258 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 111 099 000 Old_age Always - 32 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0

Very important parameters to check are, among the others, “Reallocated_Sector_Ct” and “Current_Pending_Sector”. In both cases if the RAW_VALUE is something other than 0, we should be very careful and start to backup data on the hard drive. The Reallocated_Sector_Ct is the count of sectors on the block device which cannot be used correctly.

When such a sector is found it is remapped to one
of the available spare sectors of the storage device, and data contained in it is relocated. The Current_Pending_Sector attribute, instead, is the count of bad sectors that are still waiting to be remapped. If you want to know more about the S.M.A.R.T attributes and their meaning, you can begin to take a look at the wikipedia S.M.A.R.T page.

In the output we can also see a log of the tests performed on the device:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error

1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 9590 -

2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2941 -

3 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 21 -

4 Short offline Completed without error 00% 18 -

5 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

6 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

In the Test_Description column, we can see various kind of tests were run, and all of them were completed without error. In the next section we will see what are the differences between them and how to actually launch a test on a storage device.

Available SMART tests

The smartctl utility can be used to launch a variety of self-tests:

short
long
conveyance (ATA devices only)
select (ATA devices only)

Let’s quickly see what are the differences between them.

The short test is meant to quickly check the most common problems that could be found on a storage device. The test should take no more than 10 minutes: mechanical, electrical and read performances of a disk are checked.

The long test is basically a more accurate version of the “short” test. In can take a lot of time to complete: as stated in the the smartctl manual, it can last from tens of minutes to several hours.

The conveyance test is meant to check for possible damages occurred during the transportation of the device. It usually takes minutes to complete a conveyance test. It is available only on ATA devices.

The select test, like the “conveyance” one, is available only on ATA devices, and is meant to check only the specified range of LBAs (Logical Block Addresses). The range of addresses is specified when launching the test. For example, to check addresses from 10 to 20 (inclusive), we would run:

$ sudo smartctl -t select,10-20

It is possible to specify a maximum of 5 different ranges of LBAs to check by repeating the -t option:

$ sudo smartctl -t select,0-5 -t select,5-10

The -t option is the short for --test and is used to execute a test immediately.

Running a test

We saw what are the possible tests we can run with the smartctl utility. Now let’s see how to actually launch a test. As we saw in the end of the previous section, the -t option is used to run a test immediately; we must provide the type of test we want to run as argument of the option. To execute a short test on the /dev/sda device we would run:

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION === Sending command: “Execute SMART Short self-test routine immediately in off-line mode”. Drive command “Execute SMART Short self-test routine immediately in off-line mode” successful. Testing has begun. Please wait 2 minutes for test to complete. Test will complete after Thu Sep 24 14:39:05 2020

Use smartctl -X to abort test.

The output of the command reports the time we should wait for the test to finish and the date and time when it should be complete. After the specified time interval, to check the results of the test we can run:

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

As you can notice the test (The first in the list – #1) and its results have been added to the log list. It was completed without errors:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error

1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 11286 -

2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 9590 -

3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2941 -

4 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 21 -

5 Short offline Completed without error 00% 18 -

6 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

7 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

It is possible to know the estimated time a test would take to finish. Such information should be included in the output of the smartctl -a /dev/sdx command, but can be requested explicitly by launching smartctl with the -c option (short for --capabilities). The following are the interesting lines in the output:

$ sudo smartctl -c /dev/sda […] Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 157) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes. […]

Let’s run a conveyance test, now:

$ sudo smartctl -t conveyance /dev/sda

We wait 5 minutes, and then check the results. As expected the test now appears in the list, and luckily no errors were found:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error

1 Conveyance offline Completed without error 00% 11286 -

2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 11286 -

3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 9590 -

4 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2941 -

5 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 21 -

6 Short offline Completed without error 00% 18 -

7 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

8 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

Now, for a simple select test:

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION === Sending command: “Execute SMART Selective self-test routine immediately in off-line mode”. SPAN STARTING_LBA ENDING_LBA 0 100 150 Drive command “Execute SMART Selective self-test routine immediately in off-line mode” successful. Testing has begun.

This test is successfully completed:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error

1 Selective offline Completed without error 00% 11287 -

2 Conveyance offline Completed without error 00% 11286 -

3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 11286 -

4 Short offline Completed without error 00% 9590 -

5 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2941 -

6 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 21 -

7 Short offline Completed without error 00% 18 -

8 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

9 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

Again, the results of the tests are included in the output generated when smartctl is launched with the -a option; if one wants to focus only on logs, instead, he/she can use the -l option (--log) and specify what kind of logs should be displayed. To display only error logs, one would run:

$ sudo smartctl -l error /dev/sda

To include also selftests logs, instead:

$ sudo smartctl -l error -l selftest /dev/sda

When smartctl is launched with the -a option the error, selftests and selective logs are included in the output for ATA devices.

#harddisk, #server