What tools are available for understanding the workings of modern storage like SSD and Hard Drives?
2013-08
bmike
My knowledge of storage Hard Drives and SSD is getting out of date and I would like to know what tools are available to read more extensive SMART and other data from modern drives than just "SMART Verified".
My knowledge is about summed up from reading Louis Gerbarg's article on from write() down to the flash chips and occasional summaries of the state of the art SSD from http://www.anandtech.com
As drive controllers get smarter, it seems the old "wisdom" about zeroing a drive or what happens when a block is "bad" are less applicable. I'd love any links to great technical write ups (newer than 1 ) on modern storage technology as well as programs that can access engineering data on the SATA bus and other ways to tap into the storage subsystem short of hardware dissassembly.
Bonus points for tools and information on failure modes and engineering that allows these devices to work while degraded and ensure data is marked as corrupt when detected. There are commercial products that parse this data for HDD like Drive Genius but I'm unaware of any tools that expose data from SSD like wear leveling or predict flash failure due to over use based on current or historic write rates.
harrymc
There are very many disk tools for ordinary hard disks. See this thread for a long list :
Best Free Hard Drive Health Monitoring & Diagnostic Programs.
Some of them may also do SSD, but the results are not too sure to be valid.
Below are some such products for SSD :
- Intel Solid-State Drive Toolbox
If your drive is not an Intel SSD, the only option available will be "View Drive Information". - SSD Tweaker, free and highly recommended on the Web.
- Samsung SSD Magician Tool downloadable from here.
- Indilinx SSD Status Tool downloadable from here.
- OCZ also has a line of tools that can be downloaded per disk model from here.
In all cases, it is always safer to use the tools created by the manufacturer of the SSD.
boehj
Disk Utility is the place to look on a Mac. Clicking on the HDD in question and then doing ⌘+i will show you the SMART status of the HDD.
In a terminal you can do:
$ diskutil info disk0
disk0 is where OS X is installed. To get the same information if you have a multi-disk Mac then you will need to change the numeral accordingly.
Anandtech tends to focus quite a bit on SSD technology these days. Have a browse around in the SSD/HDD Section to read up on SSDs. You'll get some articles that are more benchmarking focused and some which deal with the underlying technology - how it works - to a greater degree.
Joe Philllips
I've seen programs in the past that were able to check the SMART status of a hard disk drive but it wasn't easy for me to find. Also, I think I had to boot into the CD in order to check on it. What is your preferred method for getting this data to hopefully preempt any disk failures?
Michael Kohne
I think "S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring tools" is the one I've used before. They give you all the parameters.
If you are going to be fooling with SMART, I'd recommend looking at the Google paper on drive failures. They are one of the few groups on the planet that have enough drives to do any real analysis, so their comments on the usefulness of SMART are probably the best research you'll find on the subject.
Shane Kearney
I like the free version of HD Tune.
From the website:
HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following functions:
* Benchmark: measures the performance
* Info: shows detailed information
* Health: checks the health status by using SMART
* Error Scan: scans the surface for errors
* Temperature display
HD Tune may also work with other storage devices such as memory cards, USB sticks, iPods, etc.
Tom Wijsman
SeaTools for this and several other health tests. Other vendors have similar free testing utilities available.
SeaTools is a comprehensive, easy-to-use diagnostic tool that helps you quickly determine the condition of the disk drive in your external hard drive, desktop or laptop computer. It includes several tests that will examine the physical media on your Seagate or Maxtor disk drive and any other non-Seagate disk drive.
Tom Wijsman
For Unix-like systems there is smartd.
smartd is a daemon that monitors the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests. This version of smartd is compatible with ATA/ATAPI-7 and earlier standards.
smartd will attempt to enable SMART monitoring on ATA devices (equivalent to smartctl -s on) and polls these and SCSI devices every 30 minutes (configurable), logging SMART errors and changes of SMART Attributes via the SYSLOG interface.
Tom Wijsman
I use SMARTReporter on my Mac to put an icon in the menu bar. As long as it's green I feel OK.
SMARTReporter is a free application for Mac OS X that can warn you of some hard disk drive failures before they actually happen! It does so by periodically polling the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard disk drive. S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a technology built into most modern hard disk drives that acts as an "early warning system" for pending hard disk drive problems. SMARTReporter can notify you of impending hard disk drive failures by sending e-mails, displaying a warning dialog or executing an application. The current status of your hard disk drives is always displayed through the customizable menu item.
Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA, SATA or eSATA hard disk drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your SCSI or FireWire hard disk drive, send feedback to Apple. Please note that a S.M.A.R.T. alert doesn't mean that your HDD will completely fail for sure, nor can S.M.A.R.T. catch all possible HDD errors - it's just a very valuable indicator.
bobobobo
I just got Disk CheckUp but I am still figuring out how to use it.
ultrasawblade
If it's a Windows system, I recommend SpeedFan - it also lets you submit your SMART data to the SpeedFan website and gives you a nice little online analysis.
rob
CrystalDiskInfo is my preferred SMART info tool now, simply because it's less hassle than downloading and installing smartmontools and is available as a portable application (so you can easily stick it on a USB drive or Dropbox). You can also configure it to actively monitor your drives and report any issues in a popup notification, as well as show each drive's temperature in a separate taskbar icon.
Update: make sure you download the portable edition. The "Installer edition" has OpenCandy adware built-in and the "Shizuku edition" features anime art on the left side of CrystalDiskInfo's main window. The Shizuku edition's installer also tries to install the Amazon browser bar by default during setup, but you can opt not to install the browser bar.