In a bioinformatics lab, you may have your private servers to support your research. Hardware monitoring is also not a trivial task and you may need to learn how to handle it. Luckily, the Linux community has provided some useful tools to help achieve this.
Check how many disks on your server
You may use the command below to check
$ df -h
Here is one example of the disks on one of our servers
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1 413G 9.3G 404G 3% /
devtmpfs 63G 0 63G 0% /dev
tmpfs 63G 4.0K 63G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 63G 291M 63G 1% /run
tmpfs 63G 0 63G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda2 23T 25G 23T 1% /home
/dev/sda1 4.6T 106M 4.6T 1% /Database
tmpfs 13G 0 13G 0% /run/user/1000
From here you may see we have two normally used sda disks and one ssd disk (nvme).
Next, you may learn how to monitor your hard drives.
Monitor HDD
smartctl controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into most ATA/SATA and SCSI/SAS hard drives and solid-state drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests.
On Ubuntu, you may install smartctl using
$ sudo apt-get install smartmontools
After your installation, you may use smartctl to monitor your HDDs.
There are different formats for HDD devices:
1. "/dev/sd[a-z]" for ATA/SATA and SCSI/SAS devices
2. For SCSI Tape Drives and Changers with TapeAlert support use the devices "/dev/nst*" and "/dev/sg*"
3. For disks behind 3ware controllers you may need "/dev/sd[a-z]" or "/dev/twe[0-9]", "/dev/twa[0-9]" or "/dev/twl[0-9]"
Detailed information
1. For disks behind HighPoint RocketRAID controllers you may need "/dev/sd[a-z]".
2. For disks behind Areca SATA RAID controllers, you need "/dev/sg[2-9]"
3. For HP Smart Array RAID controllers, there are three currently supported drivers: cciss, hpsa, and hpahcisr.
a. For disks accessed via the cciss driver the device nodes are of the form "/dev/cciss/c[0-9]d0".
b. For disks accessed via the hpahcisr and hpsa drivers, the device nodes you need are "/dev/sg[0-9]*".
c. Use the forms "/dev/nvme[0-9]" (broadcast namespace) or "/dev/nvme[0-9]n[1-9]" (specific namespace 1-9) for NVMe devices.
You may use such as
$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
to show all SMART information for your device.
$ sudo smartctl -x /dev/sda
can give all information for your device, such as status, powered hours firmware state and drive temperature.
If you want to check the health status, you may need to use
$ sudo smartctl -H /dev/sda
For identity information, you may use
$ sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda
After typing the cmd above, you may see
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
in the last two lines.
Monitor HDD in RAID
Sometimes, your server may have a RAID architecture. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Drives, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.
After typing
$ sudo smartctl -x /dev/sda
you may see
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: AVAGO
Product: MR9460-16i
Revision: 5.02
User Capacity: 29,388,850,593,792 bytes [29.3 TB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Physical block size: 4096 bytes
Logical Unit id: 0x600062b203b904c023aa7a01fd41796b
Serial number: 006b7941fd017aaa23c004b903b26200
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Tue Oct 8 22:52:14 2019 PDT
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
Read Cache is: Enabled
Writeback Cache is: Enabled
...
To monitor your devices in this RAID, check your Product type. Here we use megacli to monitor.
megacli can be installed using
$ wget https://docs.broadcom.com/docs-and-downloads/raid-controllers/raid-controllers-common-files/8-07-14_MegaCLI.zip
$ unzip 8-07-14_MegaCLI.zip
$ cd Linux
$ sudo alien -k --scripts MegaCli-8.07.14-1.noarch.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -imegacli_8.07.14-2_all.deb
$ sudo ln -s /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 /usr/local/bin/megacli
$ sudo apt-get install sg3-utils
Using the command below, you may check your hard drive device id
$ sudo megacli -PDList -aALL
After that, you can check all the information on the specific device using
$ sudo smartctl -a -d megaraid,$id /dev/ada (# use the id number)
You may also use the cmd below to check the status of your devices
$ sudo megacli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL
Copyright@Andy’s blog » Hardware monitoring
