 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel here. This is Daniel Rose. I'm going to do a video today about testing your hard drive, something extremely important. Backup and data protection and all that good stuff are very, very important topics to me. Just to quickly say, I'm using Ubuntu 2010. That's why I have my terminal up here. It's not the, I think it's one of the long-term supports LTS releases Which is why it's not the latest Ubuntu. I think they're on something like 22 now I decided a while back that I want to stick with LTS releases But I don't think any of this stuff has has really significantly changed in in in the meantime um Now regarding smart testing smart stands for if I can find us here on my screen somewhere smart monitoring analysis and reporting testing This is basically a Now i'm not a hardware or a firmware guy But i'm just going to give my basic understanding of this It needs to be supported on the actual storage media the disks themselves And then the operating system can read their self-reported data now for instance When I go into my laptop which has an nvme type ssd storage This is my desktop computer and actually it's a bummer because I'm much more interested in knowing the health of my laptop which only has one drive than my desktop because if You know this if a drive blows out on my desktop I can recover pretty easily By buying a new drive and I take regular backup season clone zilla, which everyone should be doing But if I'm on business travel and my laptop goes kapoot I'm in a world of pain and that can really compromise my ability to work. So This is what smart testing is about. It's not about saying. Oh, I see that my hard drive or my ssd Is starting to break because i'm booting into a bunch and i'm getting all these errors It's about periodically pro actively running these checks and at the first sign of failure Then that's when you want to move in and what would moving in be if it were me I would first first my first move if it was getting any indication of a failing drive back up the system clone zilla Is your friend in this regard amazing amazing program? Then I would go out and buy a new replacement drive I might even use a chance to upgrade the capacity and I would Move the data from the failing drive onto the new drive And there you are put that in the computer and swap out and you're back in action. You've got you've just bought yourself Uh more time because that's the thing with flash drives Storage like ssd and hdd. They're all going to eventually fail. So you're just trying to buy yourself time Against data loss as an insurance policy And it's a lot cheaper to buy a new hard drive than it is to lose all your data when your hard drive fails And or you have to either lose the data or try to bring it to something like a data recovery specialist Lot cheaper to just buy a new disc disc discs have come down in price a lot. So anyway Uh using this utility disc there is a way to um You know check out your smart data by just clicking here a lot of people don't know this I've been using discs for i've been using a bunch to for 14 years I never saw there was a little smart data thing until uh about a year ago But it is right there just pop up here It's not under volumes because when you think about it You're not interested in the health of a of a partition. You you're caring about the health of the actual disc So click them click onto the things here smart data and self tests And this is really the key thing overall assessment disc is okay But it's quite amazing how granular the data that you're going to be getting out of this stuff is like look at this Pericycle kind 4717 the computer actually logs. How many times you've turned on this disc along with the computer, right? Now you can re manually rerun Self-test and you can see I've got three options here short extended and conveyance a conveyance I believe is designed to to look for errors that occurred as the thing was uh in transit Extended is more extended testing someone asks someone asked on one of those a bunch of forms is it safe Does running tests actually ironically it would be degrade the disc the answer was technically yes because all usage of the computer degrades the disc Or ages the disc but not beyond regular usage basically so if your disc is healthy This is when you're supposed to be running these things and you don't need to go crazy I don't think there'd be any point running these smart tests every single day But you know once a month and they're running anyway so You just you really need to check them periodically or as I said if you're going on a business trip That's when I would really recommend quickly a week before your trip Test the disc see that it's okay, and you might avoid yourself a major headache Um down the road So the second way you can do all this business is going is a pro as another GUI It's called g smart control. What I like about g smart control Is that uh, they ask you for pseudo permission. You didn't see it because it was in my other screen They asked for pseudo permission at the start. So um, you don't need to give it each time because think to When you're asking the operating system to communicate on such a low level with the hardware you're going to need elevated permission. So that's uh That's part for the course now what you can do here And I you get myself confused because I got four drives in this thing. I've got a backup drive I've got a media volume for storing on my video clips I have a A bunch to drive and I have a window bare metal drive for the rare and horrific times that I need to actually use windows Now, uh, you can do reread data. I'm going to use this one or you can perform your tests Now what I like about g smart control Unlike disks is that it tells you what you're doing, right? It tells you you can give we can run a short and extended test. It doesn't do conveyance Uh, and it gives you an estimated duration as well, which I also appreciate So you can kind of know how long you might need to sit with your thing for the extended one takes 10 minutes The short one takes two minutes. Let's just do a short one so that I can uh, You can only you only have two more minutes of my company to to tolerate But it says note that this test is no way comprehensive. Its main purpose is to detect totally damaged drives So, you know, if this for me again, I come back to that scenario of going on a business trip I'd probably be running for the for the sake of running of you know, 10 more minutes I'd go for the extended test. We can see we're already 20% Through the testing process. So I'll just sing songs for the next two minutes or something like that um So, yeah, as I said for certain storage media NVME It seems as if this is a problem Um, I spent about five minutes looking for solutions It said to install an NVME CLI and that would sort it out on one of these ask a bunch of threads It didn't that didn't work for me. Um, it couldn't find it in the repositories So I'm going to be spending a bit more time tonight Trying to uh sort this out and if I figure out a solution to I'll be able to run these tests on my NVME SSD Then I will go ahead and uh and do that. Um, there's a few more stuff. There's a few more things and smart mon tools Um, this these aren't the only ones for a bunch of Linux. I'm sure I'm only, you know, scratching the surface in terms of the tools that are available By the way, what I would recommend I've talked on this channel about dumping stuff onto HDD enclosures for cold archival storage now to the best of my knowledge There is no tool in Synology DSM for doing smart data checks on external drives, which is a big pity Um, I'm not sure if you can hook up a enclosure to an Ubuntu machine and uh run it like this I don't know but again, I will be checking and reporting back on my findings because Uh, that's basically again if you're using it for archival, uh, that's the kind of thing that you want to know about Not when the failure is happening, but before any Disgross data rot bit rot Starts threatening the integrity of your data. Uh, you can see here my test has completed without errors But it was a short two minute test and I'm going to do the extended one out. Just drill a little bit deeper But I can do that after hitting the stop button. So those are the two I would say key GUIs I find on Ubuntu for testing the healthier hard drive Definitely recommend running them periodically and again, as I said or try to emphasize the purpose of these things is really Preventative maintenance. It's not remedial maintenance. You want to do this before You find any errors and I also recommend it especially before as I said, you're traveling or any time Where murphy's rule might apply, you know, when things go wrong, they go wrong at the worst possible time Thanks for watching this video. If you want to get more videos from me, feel free to subscribe to this youtube channel. Have a great day