New In KDE Partition Manager 1.1 (II): SMART Status Reports
KDE Partition Manager 1.1 gains support for reading, analyzing and reporting the SMART status of disks. SMART (sometimes also written as S.M.A.R.T.) is an acronym for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology". In plain English it is a monitoring system for hard drives and its intention is to give the computer user a chance to take action before an impending hard drive failure -- the action being to copy his data to another disk, of course.
Virtually all disks sold today support SMART, though implementations differ a little from manufacturer to manufacturer. Also, SMART information cannot be accessed via USB or FireWire, so this does not work for external disks.
SMART information in KDE Partition Manager 1.1 is accessible either via the new "Device Properties" dialog (where the general SMART status is also shown):
(In case you are wondering what the story is behind the "Cylinder alignment" and "Sector based alignment" radio buttons, wait for a later installment in this series.)
As an alternative, the SMART report dialog can also be opened directly from a device's context menu:
If the context menu entry for SMART status is greyed out (i.e. disabled) there is no SMART support available for this device. As has been mentioned above already this may result from the drive not supporting SMART or from being attached to the computer via a bus that does not allow accessing the SMART information (USB or FireWire, for instance).
Also, if you're not running KDE Partition Manager as root (something you generally should not do, but can), you will not get any SMART information at all for any of your devices since root privileges are required to access SMART data.
The smart report dialog finally looks like this:
This dialog is split in two parts. In the upper half it shows some basic summary information about the device, beginning with the general SMART health status. If this ever shows "BAD", you know your drive will probably soon fail and it's time to back up any data on it.
Next it shows the drive's model, serial number and firmware revision, followed by some basic health parameters like temperature, bad sector count, the total time the drive has been running and the number of power cycles. The final two entries in the dialog's top half show the status for the drive's last SMART self test and and overall assessment of the drive's health.
The difference between the first entry ("SMART status") and the last ("Overall assessment") is that the former has just two possible values ("good" or "bad") while the latter gives a little more detail about what is wrong if there are problems (like "Has some bad sectors" or "Has been used outside of its design parameters in the past").
The lower part of the dialog is made up of a table showing all the drive's SMART attributes, a short description for each of those and the values associated with it. The Wikipedia entry on SMART has some more details on those attributes, though in general it's hard to get reliable information on each of those online. This is further complicated by the fact that manufacturers use the attributes rather inconsistently in parts.
Note that the table has a lot more columns than are shown here (what you see here is the default). Right click on the table header to show or hide columns with a context menu.
At the bottom of the dialog there's a button to generate a HTML version of the SMART report and save it to disk.
This concludes part two in a sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1. Part one was about Mount Management.
12 Comments
So will the be part of kde system settings? looks nice by the way :)
You say that there is no support for external hard drives, and I'm assuming that's due to the usb and firewire connectors. But how about newer SATA connections? Will external drives be usable with SMART in that scenario?
There is a KCM module (System Settings is made up of KCM modules) version of KDE Partition Manager 1.0. But in the end KCM's are not meant for complex applications and thus usability is rather weak in comparison to the "real" application.
The KCM also caused some confusion: One reviewer thought the KCM was the real application and called it "spartan" and "limited". A distro packager complained that the KCM showed up in KDE's KRunner together with the application itself and confused users.
All in all not worth the trouble so I decided to drop the KCM for 1.1.
At least they should be. I don't have an external drive with eSATA connectors so I cannot check myself.
AFAIK, udisks makes SMART information available to unprivileged users, you should be able to work with that. And FYI, a udisks Solid backend is planned.
Hi, maybe a small KCM would be nice, only designed for the most basics actions that any user could need, for example if you plug a pendrive which doesn't have format, that KCM can be launched.
Btw, I have been using it for month's and everything worked like a charm :), congrats.
Looks nice, it would not be bad to add SMART Status Report in KInfoCenter in the section on the HDD. :))
Sorry for machine translation
Does the app run as root and call gparted directly or is there a privilege escalation mechanism here, eg PolicyKit?
That's an important piece of software, however it does remind me of palimpsest, and thus I have a question : does the KDE Partition Manager use udisks directly or with the help of some abstraction layer?
I assume "gparted" (which is the name of GNOME's partition editor) is a typo/thinko and you mean libparted. Libparted is a library, so it's linked against it. KDE Partition Manager itself has to run as root, not only for SMART reports to work, but also to call the ioctl() to re-read the partition table.
A future version may support KAuth for the latter.
KDE Partition Manager does not use udisks.
For SMART support it links against the libatasmart library. I assume udisks uses that as well.
vlanz you are my personal hero of the day!
Thx