ssd smart testing - yes or no - not in the web gui

[ethereal]

i am trying to do all the relevant testing to keep an eye (or two) on my drives. i recently moved from usb boot drives to a ssd. and i wanted to set up smart testing on it.

when i went to add the test in the gui there ssd cannot be selected in the drop down menu. i know this was mentioned in a thread from about 7 months ago but it never got to any conclusion.

do you need to test the ssd like the hdd or is the ssd different and just needs monitored ?

i'm sure there are many people using ssd as a boot drive - what are they doing to monior it ?
i read threads advising schedules for testing there hdd and it would be nice if there was also advice for ssds.
why can't the ssd be selected when creating a smart test ? is it because it is a ssd or the boot drive ?

that is quite a few questions - feel free to answer them all :)

 

[Mirfster]

why can't the ssd be selected when creating a smart test ? is it because it is a ssd or the boot drive ?

Pretty sure that it is because it is the boot drive (but not 100%). You can use smart testing with SSDs (I know most support it). As to "if" you should be testing them (when they are a data drive), I would presume the answer is "Yes"; but I do not have any as a data drive.

 

[joeschmuck]

SMART Testing on a SSD = It's Fine
The SMART Short and Long Tests are read-only so this does not reduce the life of your SSD.

I cannot answer why the GUI doesn't list it, I do not have a SSD in my system as a boot device yet but I'm sure a simple addition to the CRONTAB would handle it for you. Also, maybe you could check the bug reports to see if it's already listed or add it if not.

If you want to just test it from an SSH window, you could do that just to see if things are looking good but that isn't automated which is what I suspect you would desire.

 

[Mirfster]

I am going to go over Bidule0hm's guide for "Scripts to report SMART, ZPool and UPS status, HDD/CPU T°, HDD identification and backup the config".

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...d-identification-and-backup-the-config.27365/

Might find info in there, if I do I'll let ya know (need to do this myself)

 

[joeschmuck]

It's actually quite easy to setup a script but that isn't the long term solution. Having it in the GUI would be the best way to go. Maybe it will be in Version 10.

 

[Mirfster]

Interesting, will keep that in mind.

 

[ethereal]

thank you for replying. i was hoping to have the smart test in the gui - i have 10 tests there at the moment and i thought it should be possible to have the tests together (easy to see your scheduled tests)

i haven't searched the bugs - maybe i should have

 

[joeschmuck]

i haven't searched the bugs - maybe i should have

I'm not saying it's a bug, but it sounds like it's not a feature. Keep in mind that FreeNAS was originally designed to run off of a USB Flash Drive and those devices typically do not support SMART.

Also, I just searched the bug reports and I didn't see anything open using the key words "smart boot" so it looks like there is a feature request/bug report you could submit. I'd submit it myself but since I don't have a SSD (no available SATA ports) as a boot device, I cannot validate the failure nor test any fixes.

 

[ethereal]

okay - i'll ask for a feature request

 

[Chris Moore]

I have been using FreeNAS since 2011 and always booted from USB until recently when I had a USB boot device fail and take my primary NAS offline. My bad, I didn't have a current DB backup, so I had to manually set everything back up.
After that, I have gone to a mirrored pair of disks (40 GB laptop spinning disks) in my secondary NAS as a test of the concept and I am currently building a new primary using the same plan.
From the research I have done, what I have found is that the Web-GUI is set up to specifically exclude the boot device from the list of devices that you can set to be scanned by the SMART tests.
With actual spinning disks in the unit, they can be setup to have SMART tests done, but if you make those same disks boot drives, they are excluded from the list.
I have manually setup long and short tests using the "Cron Jobs" tab and it appears to have no adverse effect on the system. My secondary NAS has been running fine for several months this way.
I can only guess that the "SMART Tests" feature of the GUI was designed to exclude boot disks because USB disks can't be tested and they made the assumption that a boot disk would be USB.