List of disk status displaying software desired

Support Software & Applications
1

While my laptop is certainly new (less than a year old) I would still like to keep an eye on the status of my SSDs, particularly the external one’s hooked up by USB as I have my games, code, docs etc on it and have been using it since before the laptop so it’s probably about time I started keeping an eye on it’s remaining lifespan

2

Hey dude. I can’t recommend any software for linux for disk analysis.

But I have this idea, two of them.

You can install disk analysis software for Windows with Wine (but for some reason I couldn’t even install it :D). Look for disk analyzers for Windows on the web. And try to install them with Wine.

But for me there is a better option: install a virtual machine, install Windows 10 on it.
And on the virtual machine with Windows 10 install the analyzer. You may have a problem with disk analysis only if you have formatted disks in the linux file system ( ext4, … ).

If my suggestions are not suitable, please let me know and if you are able to provide a more detailed description of your hardware, removable disks and other system details.

The following commands will help:

neofetch

inxi -Frmxx

Install and run neofetch:
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/howto-install-and-run-screenfetch-or-neofetch/10469?u=_master

3

Considering that you’re on XFCE, the following should integrate fairly well with your chosen desktop environment… :arrow_down:

1. gsmartcontrol, from the Community repository.

To install… :arrow_down:

sudo pacman -S gsmartcontrol

… or…

pamac install gsmartcontrol

2. diskmonitor, from the AUR :arrow_down:

This is a set of qt-/KDE-based tools. To build/install… :arrow_down:

pamac build diskmonitor

3. Other… :arrow_down:

  • smart-notifier, from the AUR.

To build/install… :arrow_down:

pamac build smart-notifier
  • crazydiskinfo, from the AUR :arrow_down:

This is a text-mode-only disk monitoring utility. To build/install… :arrow_down:

pamac build crazydiskinfo

That would be pointless, because wine does not have any direct access to the underlying hardware, which those Windows-based tools would need.

3 Likes
5

Thanks for the great point, I will know. :handshake:

1 Like
7

Tried all the options you gave, smart-notifier & crazydiskinfo wouldn’t even launch (assuming that was the correct way to try and use them), they built fine but nothing would launch when I typed their names into the terminal so gave up on them, the other 2 launched fine but won’t show any details on the drives besides their names and paths, any ideas for why that would be? The NVMe came with the laptop (which is from tuxedo.com), another is a seagate drive and the 3rd I haven’t identified yet, probs my phone given I’m using the USB ethernet hotspot feature of it for internet.

Shows my drives sure but it doesn’t detail the info I need to keep an eye on the status, TBW or DBW (missing a letter on that abbreviation, can’t remember the name properly). I doubt the neafetch will be any different but I’ll check it out anyways

Edit: I like the tool but it didn’t give me the info I was looking for so on this occasion it wasn’t helpful

8

smart-notifier presumably is some sort of icon that goes in the system tray and only notifies you when there are problems.

crazydiskinfo is started by typing the command… :arrow_down:

crazy

… in a terminal, and then it looks like this… :arrow_down:

Do you have smartmontools installed from the Extra repository? If not, then normally it should be pulled in as a dependency for gsmartcontrol. The package comes with the command smartctl, which has a man page… :arrow_down:

man smartctl

There’s some Seagate-related stuff in the AUR. Look around in Pamac (alias “Add/Remove Software” in your menu) or Octopi (if you have an AUR helper installed such as trizen or yay).

9

So you don’t want to check a disk, you want to check a NVMe. That is not that same. Unfortunately gsmartcontrol isn’t very smart in showing NVMe SMART data. Why not just use smartctl with appropriate options in your terminal?

For example for NVMe nvme0n1 (change it if you use different device identifier).

sudo smartctl --all /dev/nvme0n1
1 Like
11

Er not at this time, it just happened to show among the 3 drives “attached” to the laptop however I will try to refer back to your suggestion when I start keeping an eye on it too.

Yeah it was already installed when I went to look for it.

Only 2 show up when I search seagate, seagate-leds-git & seagate-seachest, not entirely sure which to go with so after looking through the rest of the comments I’ll investigate those more if you don’t have anything to add about them

12

And then you did a double left click on the device you want to get details of. You can also do a right click and select “view details”. If it is a NVMe, you will also need to click on “Show Output” but it will not show all. If it is a spinning disk or a SSD you might want to select the “Attributes” tab.

14

Ah, that will be why then, yeah definitely “crazy” to use a different name to what is listed, no wonder I didn’t get anything launching. Anyways worse results, couldn’t even identify the drives this time

Just noticed a “update drive database” option in gsmartcontrol already clicked on it, does it usually take a while with that or does the popup just not auto-close when done?

15

This checks the drive database of the smartmontools project. It contains metadata from manufacturers. This is not a database of your internal disks and NVMe’s.

1 Like
17

I got that much just from the path printed in the popup, just wasn’t sure if the download was typically big or something since it’s my 1st encounter with it

Welp it seems the drive is not reporting anything judging by what SeaChest_Basics -d /dev/sda -i showed me, on the off chance the info might help get me further here’s a snippet I picked out as possibly useful:

Specifications Supported:
		SPC-4
		SBC-3
		UAS
		SPC-4

Edit: Also for anyone who finds this thread who happens to need seachest also, here’s the guide I found after looking into it:

18

Why not using smartctl ? This is the default tool for checking SMART on Linux. The manufacturer tools are very specific and support only a small range of devices.

19

Because smartctl -all /dev/sda got me nothing at all

20

This command has two problems. It is --all (two dashes). And you need to run it as root. Either switch to root or use sudo .

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda
1 Like
21

Yeah I wrote that off of memory when making the post, for reference the exact command you gave me gave me this:

smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [x86_64-linux-6.3.3-1-MANJARO] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command

If this is a USB connected device, look at the various --device=TYPE variants
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
22

Are you sure your USB to SATA controller supports SMART? Some do, some don’t. It looks like yours don’t.

However, there is a long list of device options you can try. Check the man page for it (online version smartctl.8.in in trunk/smartmontools – smartmontools)

23

It’s in a USB3.X (not sure if .0, .1 or .2) port, the laptop was made by tuxedo who specialise in devices made for linux specifically, preetty sure it supports it

Edit: Redid that inxi -Frmxx command to extra more info about that particular port and drive:

ID-3: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: BUP Slim BK size: 931.51 GiB
    type: USB rev: 3.0 spd: 5 Gb/s lanes: 1 serial: ...
24

No it is not about your Laptop, it is about what chip is in your USB device.

Can you check

smartctl --all -d scsi /dev/sda
25

Well out of the information seechest gave me the only thing that might tell us anything about the chip (excluding what I already posted) is this bit:

Model Number: BUP Slim BK
...
Adapter Information:
		Adapter Type: USB
		Vendor ID: 0BC2h
		Product ID: AB24h
		Revision: 0100h