April 25, 201313 yr Can I run the "smartctl -t long /dev/sda" command on multiple disks at the same time from putty?
April 25, 201313 yr Can't you run them one after the other? If I recall correctly it runs the test in the background
April 25, 201313 yr Author Can't you run them one after the other? If I recall correctly it runs the test in the background My thought was to run the long tests all at once while I was at work. I didn't realize that the test ran in the background. Anyway I attempted to run them all at once, the weird thing is that I ran the command on sba then sbb and finally sbd. Only sbd shows the "Self-test routine in progress 80%" when I check the status of each drive. I wonder if that means it canceled the first 2 commands or if the other two drives do not show the Self-test routine in progress... I suppose I will know after lunch. I'll post back with my findings.
April 25, 201313 yr Can't you run them one after the other? If I recall correctly it runs the test in the background My thought was to run the long tests all at once while I was at work. I didn't realize that the test ran in the background. Anyway I attempted to run them all at once, the weird thing is that I ran the command on sba then sbb and finally sbd. Only sbd shows the "Self-test routine in progress 80%" when I check the status of each drive. I wonder if that means it canceled the first 2 commands or if the other two drives do not show the Self-test routine in progress... I suppose I will know after lunch. I'll post back with my findings. You must disable any spin-down. The "long" test will abort if the disk is spun down. The long test on a large drive can take 4 or 5 hours or more.
April 25, 201313 yr Author Note for all: you can run smartctl on multiple disks at once. Can anyone tell me why the testing status "Self-test routine in progress ##"only appears on my Seagate and not my WD or Toshiba drive? On the WD and Toshiba it doesn't display anything until the test has finished. The WD (model: WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0) came from removing the external enclosure and the Toshiba (model: TOSHIBA DT01ACA200) was bought a month ago. Do only some drives have the ability do display the "Self-test routine in progress"?
April 25, 201313 yr Note for all: you can run smartctl on multiple disks at once. Can anyone tell me why the testing status "Self-test routine in progress ##"only appears on my Seagate and not my WD or Toshiba drive? On the WD and Toshiba it doesn't display anything until the test has finished. The WD (model: WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0) came from removing the external enclosure and the Toshiba (model: TOSHIBA DT01ACA200) was bought a month ago. Do only some drives have the ability do display the "Self-test routine in progress"? The frustrating thing about the SMART standards, is there are nearly nothing standard about them. Each manufacturer implements them differently, with different parameters being reported, even within different drive models in their own product line, and tells nobody of their trade secrets. It is a small miracle they all spell SMART the same way Joe L.
April 25, 201313 yr Author It is a small miracle they all spell SMART the same way Joe L. HAHA! That was what I was thinking. I guess next time I should buy a more expensive drive and hope that it comes with more functionality. $75 for a 2TB Toshiba drive seemed like a good deal. Thank you again Joe!
April 25, 201313 yr Note for all: you can run smartctl on multiple disks at once. Can anyone tell me why the testing status "Self-test routine in progress ##"only appears on my Seagate and not my WD or Toshiba drive? On the WD and Toshiba it doesn't display anything until the test has finished. The WD (model: WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0) came from removing the external enclosure and the Toshiba (model: TOSHIBA DT01ACA200) was bought a month ago. Do only some drives have the ability do display the "Self-test routine in progress"? I'm pretty certain that I got that message when running long tests on my WD 2TB EARS drives, but I seem to recall that it only appeared once the test had got to 10%, which takes at least half an hour. That said, as I've never seen a long test tell me anything different from the regular SMART output (even on a few drives which I have known to be bad) I've stopped running long tests and only do destructive tests (like preclear) and watch what changes happened in the SMART counters due to the test. And yes, spinning down drives does interrupt the long tests (it probably will interrupt a short test, but as those typically only take a few minutes it is not such a problem). Regards, Stephen
April 25, 201313 yr [The frustrating thing about the SMART standards, is there are nearly nothing standard about them. Each manufacturer implements them differently, with different parameters being reported, even within different drive models in their own product line, and tells nobody of their trade secrets. It is a small miracle they all spell SMART the same way Joe L. My understanding for this is that the manufacturers didn't want to implement SMART in the first place, but were pressured to by large volume consumers (HP, Dell, etc). SMART is great for consumers (detecting failure early, etc), but probably costs manufacturers a lot in terms of RMAs. Think about how much worse off we'd be without it - never having a good indicator when a drive is failing.
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