- [Teacher] Let's show a little S.M.A.R.T analysis.
S.M.A.R.T is a monitoring system that you can use
to analyze hard drives.
It stands
for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology."
So it's a monitoring system included
with most hard drives that creates reporting data
which can be accessed
within an operating system or outside the operating system.
So you can view some basic information
for S.M.A.R.T based
hard drives in the Command Prompt in Windows.
And so for example, we could use wmic
and we'd run the wmic
discdrive,
space,
get, space, status command.
And when we do so it tells us both drives we have are okay.
What we have two drives on here.
We've got a two solid-state drives.
One is a two and a half inch drive,
that's where the operating system is,
and the other is an M.2 drive
where I keep a lot of data.
So both are okay.
So you get basic information there.
So that means Windows didn't find any issues.
If you were to get a message that said "bad"
or "unknown" or "caution" or something similar to that
then you should do some more analysis.
Now, there's also third-party tools
that you can use to get additional information.
For example, AIDA64
for Windows,
the Disk Utility in macOS,
GNOME Disks for Linux,
and another program SpinRite.
One of the problems with S.M.A.R.T data is
that it can be unreliable at times
if there's a lack of support
with the hardware or with the third-party application.
And there's a lot of information that you'll see.
So you might, some people might
incorrectly diagnose the data.
You have to diagnose carefully.
So let's take a look at another example.
This is my NAS box,
so a Synology NAS box,
and it's running a RAID 1 Array.
So network attached storage.
And this is the software to control it
and to work with it and configure it.
And from here you can view S.M.A.R.T data.
So if we go here
to our main menu and bring up the storage manager
we'll see that our system is healthy
but we wanna get more information than just that.
So we'll go down to HDD/SSD.
And actually both of these drives are hard disc drives.
They're magnetic based drives.
Click on that and we'll see both drives.
And it says normal for both, which is good,
and you could view information for either one.
I'll go to Disc 2 and we'll go to Health Info.
And of course you'd wanna do this for both
but we'll take a look here.
We'll see the health status is normal
and the S.M.A.R.T status is normal.
And we can find more information here,
and by the way
the temperature 33 degrees Celsius is normal and good,
but we can find more information
by clicking on the S.M.A.R.T Info tab.
And you can see lots
of attributes that are tested by the drive over time.
So you have to analyze these carefully
if there is any issues,
any types of error status,
but everything is okay for these drives right now.
And again, you wanna watch
for things "errors", "bad", "unknown", "cautions",
and so on.
And we can initiate tests as well.
So for example, if we're not sure
or if one of these particular attributes had a bad status
we could go to S.M.A.R.T Test
and run either a quick test or an extended test
which will take a long time and you'd wanna do
that off hours.
But we'll run a quick test right now.
And we'll start that up.
Takes about two minutes.
And so we'll let that run and come back when it's done.
Okay. And our test completed
and it shows it completed as normal.
So we're in good shape here, but again,
it should have been that way
because our S.M.A.R.T info is showing that in the status.
But once in a while
you may wanna do an extended test.
Perhaps every year or so
cause hard drives will have a limited shelf life,
limited lifespan.
So consider running tests like this every six months
or one year. Periodically run those extended tests.
Now, sometimes you might be worried
about a drive that's making noise.
If you have a magnetic base drive
that's making strange noises, or clicking sounds,
or grinding noises, then it's not recommended
that you do one of these tests,
especially an extended test,
cause that might just push the drive over the edge.
It might cause damage to it.
That usage of that extended test could complete
the damage that's already there.
So you wanna watch out for drives making any noise.
And you wanna watch out for power issues as well.
Some of the S.M.A.R.T data that you get
in the status might not actually be the hard drive,
it could be a power issue.
It could be an underpowered system
or a system that's on a grid,
you know, connected
to some type of electrical grid that has dirty power,
and because of that
we're getting corrupted files being written
to the drive and we're getting these types of errors.
So you always wanna check your electrical connection
at the AC outlet.
And for a device like this
I would always connect it to, you know,
at least a line conditioner usually.
In this case, this is connected to a UPS,
an APC UPS,
so that we have that line conditioning
for voltage and we have backup power as well.
So if, you know, the power goes out
this won't just shut down.
It's set actually to do a graceful shutdown
after five minutes.
Well within the battery power of the UPS.
So, you know, keep in mind the power could actually
be the issue when you see some problems here in the status.
So there's a little bit about S.M.A.R.T analysis.
Check out some of the tools I mentioned
and also wmic in the Command Prompt
and see if your hard drive can do S.M.A.R.T analysis.
And that's it for this video.