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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
Hi,
A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? -- Cheers, Carlos. |
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#2
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
In article , lid
says... Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? Hard Disk Sentinel can do this - it's the utility I use for my own machines. https://www.hdsentinel.com/ -- Phil, London |
#3
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
On 14/04/2019 14.36, Philip Herlihy wrote:
In article , lid says... Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? Hard Disk Sentinel can do this - it's the utility I use for my own machines. https://www.hdsentinel.com/ What is the pricing? One or two machines. I don't see that in the page. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#4
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? A quick Google gives: https://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm "DiskCheckup is free for personal use. Company licenses can be purchased for US$27.00 USD per license. Discounts apply for multiple licenses." Search: windows hard drive smart monitor with email But be aware that SMART is not bulletproof. It misses stuff. A disk can be failing (large disk area bad) without triggering the reallocated raw data field. I had one disk show symptoms that way (disk doing 5MB/sec reads in a certain patch of the disk, but no SMART alert). You'd also want that tool to email you, if the SMART subsystem stops responding. A disk can continue working, but without SMART running properly (OS driver issue etc). I have occasionally had OSes where the SMART field will not populate. Having an alert is "nice to have" but is not sufficient. I run an HDTune read benchmark curve occasionally, and check how that has changed with time. Modern OSes are "noisy", so doing this properly is harder than you might suspect. Win2K is a pretty good place to run such a test. This is what a good drive looks like (a "champion"). https://i.postimg.cc/9MVrDkyx/a-good-drive.gif That's why they invented FDB motors for hard drives. Paul |
#5
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
On 14/04/2019 15.08, Paul wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote: Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? A quick Google gives: Â*Â* https://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm Â*Â*Â*Â* "DiskCheckup is free for personal use. Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Company licenses can be purchased for US$27.00 USD per license. Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Discounts apply for multiple licenses." Search: Â*Â* windows hard drive smart monitor with email I'll pass it on :-) But be aware that SMART is not bulletproof. It misses stuff. A disk can be failing (large disk area bad) without triggering the reallocated raw data field. I had one disk show symptoms that way (disk doing 5MB/sec reads in a certain patch of the disk, but no SMART alert). You were doing the long test periodically and it did not see it? Now that I think, yes, I know someone that had a disk that developed slowness and had to be replaced. You'd also want that tool to email you, if the SMART subsystem stops responding. A disk can continue working, but without SMART running properly (OS driver issue etc). I have occasionally had OSes where the SMART field will not populate. Having an alert is "nice to have" but is not sufficient. I run an HDTune read benchmark curve occasionally, and check how that has changed with time. Interesting feature. Modern OSes are "noisy", so doing this properly is harder than you might suspect. Win2K is a pretty good place to run such a test. This is what a good drive looks like (a "champion"). https://i.postimg.cc/9MVrDkyx/a-good-drive.gif That's why they invented FDB motors for hard drives. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 14/04/2019 14.36, Philip Herlihy wrote: In article , lid says... Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? Hard Disk Sentinel can do this - it's the utility I use for my own machines. https://www.hdsentinel.com/ What is the pricing? One or two machines. I don't see that in the page. Store page. https://www.hdsentinel.com/store.php Paul |
#7
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 14/04/2019 14.36, Philip Herlihy wrote: In article , lid says... Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? Hard Disk Sentinel can do this - it's the utility I use for my own machines. https://www.hdsentinel.com/ What is the pricing? One or two machines. I don't see that in the page. I have to say that remote monitoring of SMART status on Linux is drop-dead simple with smartd. Just install and provide administrator email for errors and that's it. So when one of the many systems at the my county Library developed a bad drive I got this email in my admin email: This message was generated by the smartd daemon running on: host name: papa DNS domain: jrjml.org The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 8 Offline uncorrectable sectors Device info: ST1000DM003-1CH162, S/N:S1DAWR9G, WWN:5-000c50-0614bd93b, FW:CC56, 1.00 TB For details see host's SYSLOG. You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation. Another message will be sent in 24 hours if the problem persists. -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#8
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
On 14/04/2019 15.49, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote: On 14/04/2019 14.36, Philip Herlihy wrote: In article , lid says... Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? Hard Disk Sentinel can do this - it's the utility I use for my own machines. https://www.hdsentinel.com/ What is the pricing? One or two machines. I don't see that in the page. I have to say that remote monitoring of SMART status on Linux is drop-dead simple with smartd. Just install and provide administrator email for errors and that's it. Oh, I know, we use it :-) But this particular machine runs Windows only, and the disk broke beyond repair with no warning. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 14/04/2019 15.49, Jonathan N. Little wrote: snip I have to say that remote monitoring of SMART status on Linux is drop-dead simple with smartd. Just install and provide administrator email for errors and that's it. Oh, I know, we use it :-) But this particular machine runs Windows only, and the disk broke beyond repair with no warning. WHAAAAT? Linux is sooo hard and Windows is sooo easy... -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#10
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote: On 14/04/2019 15.49, Jonathan N. Little wrote: snip I have to say that remote monitoring of SMART status on Linux is drop-dead simple with smartd. Just install and provide administrator email for errors and that's it. Oh, I know, we use it :-) But this particular machine runs Windows only, and the disk broke beyond repair with no warning. WHAAAAT? Linux is sooo hard and Windows is sooo easy... I already posted a link to a free one. It's free for personal use, which is the most likely scenario to miss the necessary symptoms. If you have an IT department, there will be backups and you don't care. https://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm "DiskCheckup is free for personal use. Company licenses can be purchased for $27.00 USD per license. Discounts apply for multiple licenses." Modern disk drives have pretty good failure characteristics. I haven't had an outright, drop-dead failure, since losing a couple Maxtor 40GB drives back in the day. And before that, a Barracuda 32550N SCSI drive (head lock failure, big gouge in platter). Windows 10, on one release, "took over SMART", so I presume there was a scheme afoot to provide a warning right in the OS. But that disappeared, and SMART can now be used by user applications again. Paul |
#12
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
On 14/04/2019 15.41, Paul wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote: On 14/04/2019 14.36, Philip Herlihy wrote: In article , lid says... Hi, A friend passed me this question. We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? Hard Disk Sentinel can do this - it's the utility I use for my own machines. https://www.hdsentinel.com/ What is the pricing?Â* One or two machines. I don't see that in the page. Store page. https://www.hdsentinel.com/store.php Ah, thanks :-) -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#13
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of badresults?
On 14/04/2019 17.41, Paul wrote:
.... Windows 10, on one release, "took over SMART", so I presume there was a scheme afoot to provide a warning right in the OS. But that disappeared, and SMART can now be used by user applications again. "took over"? I think almost any application can read the disk and obtain that data, I don't think it can be locked? Unless W10 is way more strict about accessing the hardware. Sometime ago I saw a warning about SMART on the Bios boot screen, disk going bad or something. -- Cheers, Carlos. |
#14
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
We know of utilities to check the SMART status of a hard disk, reading the results directly on the tool. How about tools that do the checking on the background, and mail the results to somebody else, automatically and periodically, without any user intervention? Any such thing, free or at worst, cheap? HD Sentinel www.hdsentinel.com _E-mailed status report_ You can configure e-mail settings to specify where to send the daily report. Then enable the option to send a daily status e-mail and at what time to send the e-mail. _Add to Windows event log_ Besides its own logging, you can have it log events into the Event Log of Windows to check there. _Remote access_ You can access HD Sentinel on a host from another host. While you could punch holes in your router's firewall to allow the unsolicited connection and try to remember what is the current IP address of your host, HD Sentinel will work with DynDNS and No-IP to give your host a name that is easy to remember. I haven't used this feature, but suspect you will have to define a port forwarding rule in your router's firewall (because that's the IP address to which you will remotely connect). In the port forwarding rule, you specify the port in your router that your remote host will connect to (default = 61230). I don't if HD Sentinel acts as the local client that reports your router's current WAN-side IP address, or if you have to use your own reporting client (DynDNS used to provide their own). _Panic Backup_ You can select at which thresholds (disk health is below 50% or 25% and temperatures, both user configurable) at which to run a panic backup. I don't use this since I have regularly scheduled backups using Macrium that run daily in a GFS (Grandfather, Father, Son) scheme using full, differential, and incremental backups. In addition, I use Syncback to: save copies of my local data files into a .zip file that gets saved in my OneDrive folder which then syncs the .zip file up to the server in my OneDrive account, and also sync my internal HDD where the Macrium backups are stored (for quickest access) to a USB HDD drive. I also use Google Drive (now called Backup & Restore for their local sync client but the service is still called Drive) to sync my local data files (Documents, Photos, and other data-only folders that I add) to my online Google Drive account. Once a month I save a full backup to removable media. I have lots of backups, so I don't need HD Sentinel creating another one unless I was so sensitive to data loss that I couldn't survive losing any from when the daily Macrium backup was scheduled to run in the early morning each day. Not all features are available in all versions of HD Sentinel. I have had the Standard version but upgraded to the Pro version because it adds better disk tests and repairs. They have trial/free versions but I found their freeware too crippled. You can see their feature comparison chart and pricing at: https://www.hdsentinel.com/store.php Oh, and HD Sentinel works with SSDs. Besides the SMART attributes that are appropriate for SSDs, it reads the number of bytes written to the SSD to estimate remaining lifespan. For $30 for the Pro version, to me it is a good price considering all the features this product has. I don't use a lot of them, but some are nice to have if I wanted them, especially in a SOHO or business scenario. I've used some free disk monitor tools, but eventually decided to pay for a decent monitor tool. Have some freeware with payware versions where I decided to stick with the freeware version (e.g., Avast) but the health of my disks is very important that I upgraded from the freeware HD Sentinel to the payware Standard version, and then upgraded later (after a couple HDD deaths) to the payware Pro version for the better disk tests and add dsk repair (which I would consider a temporary fix until I got a replacement disk). |
#15
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Hard disk SMART status monitoring, automatic mailing of bad results?
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 14/04/2019 17.41, Paul wrote: ... Windows 10, on one release, "took over SMART", so I presume there was a scheme afoot to provide a warning right in the OS. But that disappeared, and SMART can now be used by user applications again. "took over"? I think almost any application can read the disk and obtain that data, I don't think it can be locked? Unless W10 is way more strict about accessing the hardware. Sometime ago I saw a warning about SMART on the Bios boot screen, disk going bad or something. Yes, the BIOS codes sometimes have SMART code, used to deliver a warning at POST time. And Windows 10 "grabbed" SMART, because for a while, the SMART page remained blank. But whatever the hell they were doing, they stopped after a while. Paul |
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