Re: How often to run self-tests?

On Dec 16, 2013, at 1:44 AM, Nathan Stratton Treadway <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 07, 2013 at 14:46:50 +0200, Ivan Lezhnjov Jr. wrote:
>> Per man pages long test can be run weekly, short test daily, automatic
>> offline immediate could be run per vendor default choice of typically
>> each 4 hours and so on.
>> 
>> Well, how often should one run these tests? Any known best practices?
>> Recommendations?
> 
> I'm not sure which (version of which) man page you found this info on,
> but when I originally started using smartmontools years ago I set up
> that same daily-and-weekly cycle, and I think I did so based on these
> two smartmontools-support list threads:

man page version: smartmontools-5.42 2011-10-20 SMARTD.CONF(5)

I don't mean to say that there are actual recommendations in the man page, but there are examples that in my view were attempted to be sensible.

> 
>  http://sourceforge.net/p/smartmontools/mailman/message/7331341/
>  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/1443
>    Subject: Recommended test and frequency
> 
> 
>  http://sourceforge.net/p/smartmontools/mailman/message/7331590/
>  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/1627 
>    Subject: Testing Interval
> 
> 
> In short, there's no absolute "correct" answer, but this daily/weekly
> schedule is a compromise between catching failing drives fairly quickly
> and causing undue stress on the drives, and is seems to be appropriate
> for most environments.
> 
> I haven't been following the issue particularly closely since then, but
> I haven't had any reason to change away from that schedule on my
> servers....

Very interesting. Thank you for linking me to these. However, this makes me wonder now if these tests put a lot of stress on mechanics of the drives, why do vendors typically go for every 4 hours short self-test as is stated in the man page?

Ivan
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