SMART monitoring best practices

[signal15]

I've got 8 drives on a 3Ware RAID controller. I put them all in JBOD mode. The card does it's own SMART monitoring. I heard somewhere that I should disable SMART on FreeNAS and let the 3Ware card handle it, because it can cause problems if they are both doing it.

Is this true? If so, do I just go edit each drive in FreeNAS and uncheck the SMART monitoring checkbox?

 

[cyberjock]

Uh, what? You lost me with the "card does its own SMART monitoring". You can query the SMART info on the drive(and sometimes its proprietary to the controller manufacturer.. 3ware's is proprietary) but the card doesn't do any "good drive" or "bad drive" analysis.

FreeNAS should handle the SMART functions. 3ware requires special parameters for the command line. Read up on smartctl and you should be able to figure out how to configure it. If your card doesn't support it, then you should consider switching to one that does provide SMART passthrough.

On the last 3ware controller I used the commands were smartctl -a -d 3ware,(drivenumber) /dev/twa0 but yours may be different depending on your hardware.

If you want to see exactly how crappy things can get when you don't have FreeNAS doing SMART monitoring(and its a proprietary setup that wasn't compatible with FreeNAS) then check out what happened to me in March.