On 01/14/2014 01:14 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Jan 14, 2014, at 1:29 PM, George Mitchell <geo...@chinilu.com> wrote:
And the key to monitoring hard drive health, in my opinion, is SMART and what
we are lacking at this point is a SMART capability to provide visual
notifications to the user when any hard drive starts to seriously degrade or
suddenly fails.
Gnome does this:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2012-November/msg03124.html
The problem is that something around 40% of failures come with absolutely no
advance warning by SMART. So yes it's better than nothing but we're still
rather likely to not get sufficient warning.
The journal already marks and red types serious problems. I agree that
the role of bringing this information to the desktop would be the
desktop, in my case KDE, which in my case is not providing me with a
solution to this. I am glad that at least Gnome has taken care of this,
thanks probably to Red Hat.
If SMART were capable of launching pop up warnings, btrfs would not have to
worry so much about arrays going simplex undetected.
I don't see a tie in between Btrfs and SMART. Btrfs's behavior in the face of
SMART indicating e.g. a high number of reallocated sectors in the past hour,
shouldn't change. Only once the drive reports read or write failures would
Btrfs need to change its behavior. The SMART warnings preferably should flag
the user with some kind of warning.
Well OK, I get that.
And it should really be the user's responsibility to be running SMART and
providing sufficient number of drives AND sufficient additional free space to
accommodate potential drive failure and still retain desired level of
redundancy extra drives in their RAID arrays. That is where I stand on this.
I'd say the OS should do it. With linux distros, that's the desktop. I don't
think users should have to be configuring SMART at all.
The problem is that some users might be running systems that, for
whatever reason, are not compatible with SMART and distros are loath to
automatically enable functions that might result in DOAs. I myself have
had multiple cases of locked up systems before due to SMART issues. But
I do think the distros need to make SMART configuration a whole lot
easier than it currently is.
Chris Murphy
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