KDE Plasma 5.20 Will Alert You If Your Disk Is Failing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.20 Will Alert You If Your Disk Is Failing

KDE's Plasma 5.20 desktop picked up a number of new features this week...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Plasma-5.20-SMART-More

[khnazile]

Oh, disk failure warnings that was one of those features we had in KDE 3.5!

[Danny3]

Wow, that's a really cool feature to have for the unfortunate times.
I wonder if it Linux filesystems have have something similar to Windows bad sectors relocation and if KDE Plasma can show that count too.
I had only once a had drive failing and this was the sign which I discovered by using a third part too like CrystalDiskInfo which showed a high number of bad / relocated sectors.

The good part was that it still had warranty and they replaced it without headaches.

If this feature can warn users about this long enough before they lose the warranty, Plasma can even make people save money, which is really awesome!

Congrats and many thanks to the developer of this feature and of course to the rest of KDE team for all the help!

[skeevy420]

I hope that it's smart enough to detect false positives like when my dumbass plugged in one too many SATA drives and started getting random, weird ass SMART errors and thought that two of my drives went out...nope, went over the motherboard's limit...but I bought a new 480GB SSD to replace the two 320GB "failed drives" in that root mirror

[Slartifartblast]

That's nice, maybe in 1999 with spinning rust that gave some inclining towards an imminent HDD failure but an SSD failure mode is most likely "BANG" with no warning.

[ssokolow]

That's nice, maybe in 1999 with spinning rust that gave some inclining towards an imminent HDD failure but an SSD failure mode is most likely "BANG" with no warning.

Probably written by someone like me. I just bought a pair of new 10 TB platter drives for bulk storage plus backup of bulk storage. (one WD Red and one Seagate Ironwolf.)

[Slartifartblast]

Probably written by someone like me. I just bought a pair of new 10 TB platter drives for bulk storage plus backup of bulk storage. (one WD Red and one Seagate Ironwolf.)

Never rely on SMART, it isn't that smart. PS CMR or SMR drives, I hope they weren't SMR ?

[bug77]

Wow, that's a really cool feature to have for the unfortunate times.
I wonder if it Linux filesystems have have something similar to Windows bad sectors relocation and if KDE Plasma can show that count too.
I had only once a had drive failing and this was the sign which I discovered by using a third part too like CrystalDiskInfo which showed a high number of bad / relocated sectors.

SSDs are different: they have saved up space and will relocate data over there when reads/writes start to fail.

That's nice, maybe in 1999 with spinning rust that gave some inclining towards an imminent HDD failure but an SSD failure mode is most likely "BANG" with no warning.

SMART can still keep tabs on disk usage, so there's that.
Funny thing is, SSDs are not supposed to go belly-up at all, but go into read-only mode when they fail. But since every modern OS wants to write access time info, good luck reading from such a SSD You should be able to mount it in r/o mode or something, I hope I won't get to test that.

[Danny3]

That's nice, maybe in 1999 with spinning rust that gave some inclining towards an imminent HDD failure but an SSD failure mode is most likely "BANG" with no warning.

Are you sure about SSDs being so bulletproof ?

What about wear level cause by torrenting, swap partition / file, log files and other tasks with a lot of reads / writes, would they still not fail ?

[Slartifartblast]

Funny thing is, SSDs are not supposed to go belly-up at all, but go into read-only mode when they fail.

A scene from the excellent Man In the White Suit (1951) when things don't go quite as you'd expect.