I have a DAS that connects five drives, plus an external drive in its own enclosure. I'm looking for reliable utilities or methods to monitor the health of these drives so I can swap out any that may be close to failure before it happens. Any recommendations?
5 Answers
SMART data should be enough for monitoring your drives. Nowadays, NVMe drives report a lot of useful data too. You can also tap into the NVMe management tool if you're on Linux, but it's not strictly necessary.
It really comes down to how critical a drive failure is for you. Programs like DriveDX can provide health estimates for your drives. Personally, I have a drive that’s shown average health for years without issue. If you have a solid 3-2-1 backup strategy, it might be fine to wait until a drive actually fails.
Have you tried Spinrite? It's an older tool but can be really effective for drive diagnostics and recovery.
I use a Synology NAS that relies on SMART as well. Just last week, one of my Seagate Ironwolf drives failed without any prior warnings, which was concerning. Luckily, I had my backup systems in place, so I replaced it without losing data and got everything replicated fairly quickly. It’s always good to have redundancy!
You shouldn't overlook S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). It’s built into most drives and lets you check their health. If you're on Linux, you can use the smartctl command to access all that info.
Related Questions
Lenovo Thinkpad Stuck In Update Loop Install FilterDriverU2_Reload