Disk Health Monitoring

Although a robust and redundant storage is recommended, it can be very helpful to monitor the health of your local disks.

Starting with Proxmox VE 4.3, the package smartmontools
[smartmontools homepage https://www.smartmontools.org]
is installed and required. This is a set of tools to monitor and control the S.M.A.R.T. system for local hard disks.

You can get the status of a disk by issuing the following command:

# smartctl -a /dev/sdX

where /dev/sdX is the path to one of your local disks.

If the output says:

SMART support is: Disabled

you can enable it with the command:

# smartctl -s on /dev/sdX

For more information on how to use smartctl, please see man smartctl.

By default, smartmontools daemon smartd is active and enabled, and scans the disks under /dev/sdX and /dev/hdX every 30 minutes for errors and warnings, and sends an e-mail to root if it detects a problem.

For more information about how to configure smartd, please see man smartd and man smartd.conf.

If you use your hard disks with a hardware raid controller, there are most likely tools to monitor the disks in the raid array and the array itself. For more information about this, please refer to the vendor of your raid controller.