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Smartmontools Documentation
Table of Contents
In this section we provide documentation upon basic and general understanding of smartmontools. Have a look on the FAQ Page too, where you find information concerning more specific issues.
Manpages
If you are having trouble understanding the output of smartctl or smartd, please first read the manual pages installed on your system:
man 8 smartctl man 8 smartd man 8 update-smart-drivedb man 5 smartd.conf
Here are on-line versions of the smartmontools man pages:
smartctl manual page
smartd manual page
update-smart-drivedb manual page
smartd.conf manual page
Note that these are the manual pages for the current version of smartmontools in the developers SVN repository; they might not correspond to the (possibly older) version of smartmontools installed on your system. So the manual pages installed on your system should be regarded as definitive for your installation.
Tutorials
Bad block HOWTO for smartmontools
Monitoring Hard Drive Health on Linux with smartmontools ("Random Bits", Jan 2009)
Step by step for beginners. Clear instruction with very nice layout :-)
Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART (Linux Journal, Jan 2004)
Vorbeugen statt Crash (Deutsch) from LinuxUser 2004/10
Crash Prevention (English version of above) from Linux Magazine Dec 2004
Case Studies
- smartctl Example Reports
- Graphical Monitoring with Munin: Agony of a dying disk (plus buggy disk firmware)
SMART Testing
- Types of tests
Offline test (Data collection)
Short Selftest
Long Selftest
Conveyance Selftest (ATA only)
Selective Selftest (ATA only)
- Handling and configuration
Automate selftests with smartd
Special options for powermanagement
SMART Attributes
If you find strange output, or unknown attributes, please look in the below listed pages with vendor specific info.
When you don't find an answer to your question there, send an email to smartmontools-support and we'll help you try and figure it out.
RAW Values
Different vendors, different interpretation..
The RAW values of SMART attributes (temperature, power-on lifetime, and so on) are stored in vendor-specific structures.
Sometime these are strange. Hitachi disks (at least some of them) store power-on lifetime in minutes, rather than hours.
IBM disks (at least some of them) have three temperatures stored in the raw structure, not just one. And so on.
Bruce Allen said on smartmontools-support list (2007-08-31): The raw values for certain Attributes have vendor-specific meanings and are hard to interpret unless you know exactly how the vendor uses them on that specific disk model. The bit pattern might be a mix of flags, counters, and bitmasks, for example, leading to large and strange numbers. I wouldn't worry about the raw values very much. The normalized values (VALUE/WORST/THRESH) should have a sensible interpretation.
Nevertheless smartmontools have a new EXPERIMENTAL feature to log Attributes Raw Data in external files. See option --attributelog in smartd manpage and read the authors instructions.
Franc Zabkar has a special interest in deciphering raw values. Read some of his elaborated postings on smartmontools-support mailing list.
External Information Resources
Links to vendor spec files for SMART attributes
Further collections see Links page.
Warnings
License
All content in this wiki is published under GNU GPL.
