
FreeNAS Hard Drive Troubleshooting Guide - mikecarlton
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hard-drive-troubleshooting-guide.17/
======
unethical_ban
This sort of thing does not belong on a forum. It belongs in a wiki or
official documenation.

It is a fantastic guide, as I have always been hesitant to trust the "passed"
of the SMART test.

~~~
gbrown_
> It is a fantastic guide, as I have always been hesitant to trust the
> "passed" of the SMART test.

I'd say you're right not to trust such things. A single piece of S.M.A.R.T.
data in isolation seldom tells you much. Metrics derived from smartctl along
with metrics of how the disk is performing are far more useful. Going further
depending on your environment if you have a large enough deployment of a
particular drive you may also be able to infer other drive failure
characteristics.

~~~
csydas
I would agree with this. I hadn't taken the time to read the man for smartctl
and understand the output from smartctl -a until I saw this article, and I'm
glad I now have. Since I work with a lot of clients that do all on-premise
virtualization, it's helpful to be able to quickly get an idea of where a disk
is at as far as SMART is concerned. Most of the vendor tools leave a lot to be
desired, IMO, or have inconsistent metrics, so it's nice to just be able to
point straight at what the source data from the attributes says.

