I opened my laptop to a message. A dreadful message. One of those things we never wish to see, and yet are glad we did in time:
For those who wish to avoid HDD / SSD failures, smartmontools provides a way to monitor your disks in order to avoid losing data. In this case, my SSD is failing at 21,000+ hours.
WARNING: disks fail unexpectedly. Sometimes without warning. Many SSD / HDD fail much earlier than example SSD on video / screenshots. Smartmontools is simple another tool at our disposal.
Regular backups still highly recommended.
SMARTMONTOOLS / SMART-NOTIFIER / GSMARTCONTROL
Installing the package 'smartmontools' (on any Linux dist) will provide the tools needed to inspect a given SSD / HDD for errors, along with reporting the history of previous errors.
Disk errors tend to occur prior to the ultimate failure of a given harddrive / SSD (solid state drive). This is what smartmontools / smart-notifier relies upon, to (hopefully) help you avoid data loss. As with anything else, nothing is 100%. Making a backup of your most important files, still strongly recommended.
Debian based Linux:
sudo apt install smartmontools smart-notifier gsmartcontrol -y
The above command installs text based smartmontools package, a graphical smartcontrol and pop up notifier: alerting us to failing disks - hopefully in time to save our data.
Next, find your disks using lsblk
TIP: find your disk in question by matching the size (GB / TB)
EXAMPLE USAGE
START TESTING / CHECKING
You can opt for either a short, or long test. The short test option takes mine roughly 2 minutes (varies dependent on hardware). Longer test option may take hours.
REVEALING RESULTS / CHECK DISK
This disk looks good.
Note the dash mark between Always and the final RAW _VALUE numbers. This particular disk has not had any failures on SMART record. And appears to be in good health (remember: disks still can fail unexpectedly).
GRAPHICAL OPTION: GSMARTCONTROL
Errors in red can signal problems with your storage device.
This SSD has pages and pages of error records. Not looking good for this Qubes installation.
SMART-NOTIFIER
And finally, ensure to have smart-notifier to alert you to possible disk failures ahead.
How about you? Did your device have any error history? Disk failures in the past?
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