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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

In article , lid
says...

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.

The pack of five(?) licenses is good value.

--

Phil, London

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.

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.

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).

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