Hard drive diagnostics and health monitoring

Miradore Clients collect health and reliability information of hard drives in managed Windows, Linux and macOS computers. The information is collected using SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which is a monitoring system included on most modern hard disks. However, all hard drive manufacturers don't support SMART analysis, which means that for some devices the SMART attributes cannot be collected.

The collected SMART data attributes are described in the table below.

SMART attribute

Description

Health status

This field shows the result of the overall SMART health assessment test of a hard drive.

The field value "Passed" means that the hard drive is in good health, whereas "Failed" indicates imminent hard drive failure and the data should be backed up.

Consider hardware replacement and data backup if the result is failed.

Reallocated sector count

This field shows the number of reallocated sectors, also known as bad sectors, that have been discovered and remapped. On an SSD disk, the field indicates the number of failed flash memory blocks.

The value range starts from zero. Degradation of this attribute may indicate impending drive failure or slow down the disk.

Consider hardware replacement and data backup if the value is more than zero.

Uncorrectable error count

This field reports the number of hard drive read errors which could not be recovered using hardware ECC.

The value range starts from zero. The probability of drive failure increases as the number of errors climbs. The rule of thumb is that zero is good, and above is bad.

Consider hardware replacement and data backup if the value is more than zero.

Temperature

This field indicates the disk temperature in Celcius degrees as monitored by a sensor inside the drive.

According to current knowledge, temperature alone isn't a good predictor of hard drive failures. Studies suggest that only temperatures higher than 45C or lower than 25C lead to higher hard drive failure rates. However, in general it is a good idea to keep disks within the optimal temperature range to prolong their lifetime.

Wear level

This field shows the estimated lifetime of a hard drive in percentages.

The attribute has a value range of 0-100, with 100 typically being an unused drive and 0 being completely worn out. The attribute value typically decreases linearly from 100 down to 1.

Notice that device manufacturers may report this attribute inconsistently. For some manufacturers' devices, the attribute value starts from 0 and linearly climbs to 100.

 

A single computer's hard drive SMART data can be viewed at "Asset configuration item > Inventory report > Hardware > Hardware > Physical disks" and "Operations > Asset management > Inventory reports > Computers > Physical disks view" shows the data for all managed computers.

In the web service API and Report builder, the computers’ hard drive SMART data is available through asset extension "InvDiskDrive".

Related to

Inventory data collection