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In the past I have been looking for hard disc (SMART) monitoring utilities and have been able to test all in this page:
http://smartlinux.sourceforge.net/smart/dload.php

After several months of trial and error I have to say that *DriveSitter* is the most thorough one. Bar none. It is highly recommended.
http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/index.htm

Hey Thomas,
If you say its good, that's good enough for me.
I'll probably spring for the $30.
It will come out of the cat food budget.
They can live on corn flakes this week.
Or maybe they'll eat the neighbor's pit bull they've put in the hospital twice.

glypticmax wrote:They can live on corn flakes this week.
Or maybe they'll eat the neighbor's pit bull they've put in the hospital twice.

brave cats ! Those corn-flakes, do wonders for their moral !

Is there anything as terrifying/life changing as seeing, " Drive failure ! Drive Failure! " ? .....


It might as well say, . Your a failure --- if you don't have a backup. lol...

Having a drive without monitoring it ... is like having a car with no fuel gauge.

Hmmm ...

Is that worse than no spedometer ?

The click of death.........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8S5F2Bd7uA

I shouldn't laugh, ..... I have a pair of Raptor drives.

If anyone has a Raptor drive, .. they make this strange high pitch clicking sound ( it's very signature) .... Just hearing it makes me nervous.

ivox3 wrote:Is that worse than no spedometer ?

Yup !

ivox3 wrote:
If anyone has a Raptor drive, ..

..had.. well it got replaced. It (36GB) was sitting in a server with the OS installed on it until i restored an image (Acronis tool) from the disk to 4 workstations at once...now after 20 min the multiple read access fried the drive completely and it went bye bye.. it wasn't a year old, poor HDD.

..this was over 100mbit lan and i thought it could cope with it.. now i know that is a big No-No

Can't wait to have a SSD in my workstation, no click (of death) anymore....
and absolute silence.. when you have a raptor you know what i mean...kkrrrggg-brrrbbrrr-krrggggg..



*btw.
have you seen this guy: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=459

My new Maxtor 500Go 32Mo has lived one week, and suddenly died just after i finished to install all the stuff on it
Hope the new Seagate will do better...

..call me unlucky, but i had two WD400 GB RE HDDs fail in a RAID5 within 1 week
(luckily I had hotspare)

now that array has been running like a clockwork for 1.5 years... no smart warnigs at all.

well it got hot outside in the last weeks so i did some research on drive temperature recommendations, maybe they went too hot?? (~ 45°c)

after looking around I found this interesting paper:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

hmm.. looks like SMART is not too accurate after all.. and temperature is not the cause either..

If you guys are waiting for a SMART warning ... then it is too late. It is like waiting to see the airbag popup to figure out that you are actually crashing the vehicle.

The beauty about Drivesitter, is that it performs statistic analysis on the SMART attributes and keeps track on the rates of change of those attributes. It does not wait until the threshold is reached.

I see your point... and I admit i did not look at all the features in depth, but it is usually not possible to poll smart values from within 3rd party programs when the Hdd is connected via a raid controller.

*now i checked the FAQ.

"Unfortunately, DriveSitter does not currently support RAID. DriveSitter works with most RAID controllers if the RAID feature is disabled."

polynurb wrote:... but it is usually not possible to poll smart values from within 3rd party programs when the Hdd is connected via a raid controller.

True.
That is a technology limitation in which case you are out of luck.
The thing is if drivesitter cannot do it, then quite possibly, nobody can.
(I don't know if there are any *really* expensive SCSI-grade programs out there that can circumvent the limitation)