
LINUX DISK HEALTH INSTALL
You know, if you install ‘gnome-disks’ then you can just do all of this graphically. The most interesting/valuable disk health checks are covered above, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing more about your tools. Simply run man smartctl and look through the options. There’s more to smartctl and even smartmontools, but not a whole lot that’s terribly interesting or important. With that information in hand, you can keep a reasonable eye on your disk health. You can check the results and technical details against the Wikipedia link. If you want to do that, first open the terminal with CTRL + ALT + T and, once open, enter the appropriate command.Īnyhow, pay attention to the results in that report. Smartmontools is easily installed with your package manager, or you can do it in the terminal. It’s a fairly robust application and is available for the major distros. So, let’s get started! (Also, click on the Wikipedia link above.) Install ‘smartmontools’:Īs I said above, we’ll be using ‘smartmontools’ to check the disk health with S.M.A.R.T. The best way to be prepared for it is to have spares and a good backup plan. Drive failure is real and you should be prepared for it. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve had drives fail within weeks of the warranty ending – and sometimes before the warranty ended. I have an external HDD that gets used constantly – and it’s well over a decade old. As I said in the opening paragraph, there’s a limit to how long your drives will last – but it will eventually and certainly fail.Īt the same time, there are probably many of us who have ‘magical’ drives. However, drives are perfectly happy failing without giving you any warning at all. It’s actually pretty accurate data – sorta… If it tells you there’s a problem, chances are good that drive health is an issue. We’ll be using “ S.M.A.R.T.” (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) and “ smartmontools” for this exercise.
LINUX DISK HEALTH MANUAL
I periodically perform manual disk health checks. Heck, in theory, many systems are supposed to monitor disk health and alert you of impending failure (see some BIOS options), though I’ve personally had poor luck relying on automated alerts. This is a known limitation and there are ways to monitor disk health. You should plan on your drives failing because, given enough time or use, they will fail. Either hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SDD), your storage media has a limited lifespan.

Your storage media has a useful lifespan and the clock is ticking it from day one. Use the mount point (in the Mounted on column) to specify the drive you want to check.Disk health is an important matter. This displays the usage on your primary hard drive. The df command can be used to display a specific file system: df -h /dev/sda2 These are the files that prevent multiple users from changing the same file at the same time. For example, the tmpfs /run/lock is used to create lockfiles. These are used by /run and other Linux processes as temporary filesystems for running the operating system. tmpfs – You may have several of these.This is part of the Linux operating system. udev – This is a virtual directory for the /dev directory.

It may be listed as /sda1, /sda0, or you may even have more than one.

The list of filesystems includes your physical hard drive, as well as virtual hard drives: This is also sometimes called a mount point. Mounted on – This is the directory where the file system is located.Use% – Shows the percent of the disk used.Avail – The amount of unused (free) space on the filesystem.Used – Amount of space used on each filesystem.This includes physical hard drives, logical (partitioned) drives, and virtual or temporary drives. Filesystem – This is the name of each particular drive.The df command lists several columns: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
