SMART tool that can report on many drives?

JJ Johnson

Gawd
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Jun 26, 2008
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I have an SSD and 15 additional drives in my home file server. Reading SMART info from all of the drives has proven to be a little difficult. The motherboard's SATA headers and the HBA I'm using all pass SMART data, but the software tools I've tried have been lacking.

I like CrystalDiskInfo, but it shows a maximum of eight drives. It always shows the six drives on the motherboard, plus two additional. The only way to see SMART data from the remaining seven hard drives is to pull the first seven.

HD Tune Pro lists all of the drives, but it doesn't update the SMART data when I switch drives in the drop-down list. It shows all kinds of wrong info, including the wrong serial number for the drive selected, so I don't trust anything shown.

Are there any decent applications that will work with this many drives?
 
Are you looking for something that will just display the data or something that will log the results on a specified basis? How many different controllers do you have your 15 drives connected to and what models are they (for example, if you had 10 connected to your motherboard directly there could be up to 3 different controllers in play?) Is Windows the only OS you are running on that machine?
 
Just something to display the data. At the moment, I have just 14 drives (including the system SSD) on two controllers. I'll be adding an additional HBA to be able to use two additional drive bays that are currently open, probably a two or four port Marvell based device.

TYAN S5211G2NR motherboard, Intel 3210 chipset, ICH9R: six drives
Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X: eight drives
 
With HD Sentinel, make sure you are running their latest version (Your Supermicro card isn't specifically supported in HDS). You can give SmartMonTools a try, it is cross platform and has a large number of supported devices.
 
i like hd sentinel as well. here's a happy screen shot of my array. :)

9kszPC3.jpg
 
Hard Disk Sentinel seems to work. Mostly. One thing it's doing is munging the serial numbers of drives on the Supermicro card, which is how I identify the drives. It's fine with those on the motherboard's controller.
 
Yes like I said above your particular SM card isn't fully supported by HDS. SmartMonTools should have support for all your drives and controllers.
 
Ahh. Screenshot. Good idea!

This is Stablebit's Scanner.

If you check it out, be sure to check out the FAQ as there are a couple tweaks that need to be set depending on your controller/s.

scanner-1.jpg


scanner-2.jpg


scanner-3.jpg
 
Yeah, Stablebit's scanner wasn't able to read drive info such as serial numbers through the Supermicro card, and it appeared to have the same issues as HD Tune Pro in not always updating the SMART info when I selected a different drive attached to the card.

I think I'm just going to be out of luck until I get a different, more recent HBA.
 
With Scanner, did you check out any of the advanced settings?

I had to enable "UNSAFE" for it to read SMART from my Highpoint 2740 and "NO WMI" for it to read from my LSI 9240.

Good luck in your quest!

~RF
 
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