Excellent article in Linux Journal on a little-known facility built in to most ATA and SCSI drives to allow monitoring of the health of the disc drive, and even being alerted before a drive fails:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6983 I downloaded smartmontools-5.26, compiled and installed it with no problems, and did thinsg like smartctl -s on to turn on health monitoring and configured /etc/smartd.conf and added smartd.initd to /etc/init.d and ran chkconfig to add it in. In the last 10 years I think I've had four HDD fail on me (though not lost data, fortunately, since I do try to be careful with backups). smartmon should give you at least 24 hours notice of a failing drive. Sounds like a good combination with software raid! 1090 smartctl -i /dev/hda 1091 smartctl -s on /dev/hda 1094 smartctl -i /dev/hda 1095 smartctl -Hc /dev/hda 1101 smartctl -A /dev/hda 1103 smartctl -l error /dev/hda 1104 smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda I've never heard of such a facility for Windows. <smug smile> luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
