How does SMART & Self Tests... work?

Support & Help Requests
1

In trying to understand why my SSD sometimes does not boot I've searched hi and lo for analysis tools.

Inside Control Center / Hardware / Disks / (the three horizontal bars icon), the one on the left is hidden .

What base/standard program is that item calling and more importantly how can I find out for myself in the future?

As an aside what is the name of (the three horizontal bars icon)? More? Hidden Things? :slight_smile:

Thanks, Fred

2

SMART is something that's built into most hard disks and SSDs, so my understanding is that the disk itself is doing the monitoring and testing.

There is the package smartmontools which you can install to give you the command smartctl to use the command line. I'm not sure if Disks uses this as its backend or uses its own backend.

Since Chrome popularized it – before switching to three dots – I've usually heard it called the hamburger menu, since it looks like the two pieces of bun plus the burger patty.

1 Like
3

This is correct, it is refereed to as a hamburger menu. I do web design.

4

Thanks for that, Fred

5

There is also a nice GTK frontend for smartmontools called gsmartcontrol which shows more information than Disks does.

6

Hallo fey42

I’ve just had an hdd on a windoze 7 machine die…
Yes I had backups.

When trying to find out why the W7 machine was freezing and syruping I entered the HP Bios and found the SMART tool there. I ran it with the result “no disk detected”.

One new hdd later, lots of new knowledge about partitioning bootable drives, an install of Ubuntu-Mate (was due to happen in April 2019 when redmond stop supporting W7 anyway) and the machine is back in business.

That’s the limit of my experience with SMART. :slight_smile: