Hello,

 

I've just added a 1Tb Crucial P1 as a cache drive to my 6.12.3 setup. I've used the preclear plugin to validate the drive before assigning it to cache. I wanted to run a final short SMART self test, but to my surprise, the button, while clickable, does nothing. Same for the long self test. (See "Self Test" screenshot)

 

The only way I was able to get a SMART report was through the "smartctl -a" command. (See "Result" screenshot)

 

Now I have a vague knowledge of the fact that NVMe drives, while providing "SMART" data, usually do not adhere to traditional formatting of SMART data in the form of attributes. This could explain why the attributes tab is empty, save for a single "flag" column. (See "Attributes" screenshot)

 

But that does not explain why Unraid's interface is unable to run a SMART test on the drive, with broken buttons in the GUI. There also seems to be a very little info on the topic, save for a single reddit post from 3 months ago.

 

TL;DR: I'm worried that Unraid will not natively keep track of SMART data, and notify me when things are out of line. The Crucial P1 is known to be a hot running drive with low endurance, making proper monitoring all the more important. Is Unraid's GUI monitoring of NVMe drives broken, or is there a deeper issue?

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited July 28, 20232 yr by SinoBreizh
spelling

Most NVMe not support SMART test. Keep monitoring attributes already enough. You can further Scrub disk for deeper check.

Edited July 28, 20232 yr by Vr2Io

That's about as expected for the SMART data, which is fine.

 

What I'm worried about is that Unraid won't handle NVMe health (no alerts, regular self tests, etc), and the broken GUI seems to indicate that NVMe support was indeed an afterthought.

 

I can't find any information on the topic; it seems like people just wing it and hope for the best. Manually running scrub every once in a while can't possibly be the expected way to manage disk health? Especially given how well Unraid handle drive health otherwise, for Array disks and Cache.

Unraid will monitor SMART and you can run regular scrubs, like mentioned NVMe devices don't support SMART tests.

Thanks for confirming it.

 

With the broken GUI for self tests, I was worried Unraid's management of NVMe drives had underlying issues that no one talked about. Into the pool it goes then!