Re: smartmontools query

Hello,

I have few doubts with smartmontools, can someone clarify ?
>
> 1. Shall I rely on smartctl -H <dev> to see if the device is in good
> health ? Or do I need to do further selftest, short or long test ? My
> aim is just to find if the disk is fine or not for read and write. We
> have a high availability solution and we want to use this utility to
> failover to standby node in case of any issue with the disk.
>

In my experience, you can rely on -H in the way that if it reports a
failure, the disk is sure to be broken. It's not good enough if you want
early failover.


> 2. Health check with -H option or selftest or short test – are they
> handled by the device driver independently ? Or they consume some CPU
> cycles ? Any data read or write is involved to run these tests that
> takes CPU times ?
>

Although I can't answer that authoritatively, still I wouldn't schedule a
selftest for rush hours. The test is performed by the drive and afterwards
you can query the result from its SMART logs. I would expect lower IO
during self-test run.


> 3. What exactly -H checks ?
>

General health of the drive. If an uncorrected read/write error rate is too
high, or some other evident issues are detected, the overall state changes.
In my experience, any uncorrected read/write should mark the disk as
failed, but it doesn't.

Best regards,
Bolesław Tokarski

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