Commands to check Hard disk information and diagnostic

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Issue

  • What are the commands to see hard drive or LUN information
  • How to diagnose a hard drive problem using command line

Resolution

  • 'badblocks' command will be useful to check if there are any bad sectors present in the disk. But this can cause filesystem corruption on a live system. So always umount the filesytem before you run this command and make sure you have a known good backup of your data.

      # badblocks -n -vv /dev/sdX

    See "How can I determine hard disk I/O errors are an issue in Red Hat Enterprise Linux?" for more information

  • smartctl tool will be helpful to find if hard disks are failing,

    See "How can I test if my hard disk is going bad?" for more information on smartctl

    # smartctl -d scsi -a /dev/sdi 
       
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               COMPELNT
Product:              Compellent Vol
Revision:             0606
User Capacity:        10,737,418,240 bytes [10.7 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
LU is thin provisioned, LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate:        15000 rpm
Logical Unit id:      0x6000d310032ca600000000000000000e
Serial number:        00032ca6-0000000e
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Wed Oct 17 13:38:38 2018 CST
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Disabled
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported
          
 === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
 SMART Health Status: OK
             
Error Counter logging not supported
             
              
[GLTSD (Global Logging Target Save Disable) set. Enable Save with '-S on']
Device does not support Self Test logging

  • ListHardware tool will be efficient to find more details on the disk.

lshw -c storage -c disk

*-usb:0
description: Mass storage device
product: USB3.0-CRW
vendor: Generic
physical id: 3
bus info: usb@2:3
logical name: scsi13
version: 2.04
serial: 20120501030900000
capabilities: usb-3.00 scsi emulated scsi-host
configuration: driver=usb-storage maxpower=800mA speed=5000Mbit/s
*-disk
description: SCSI Disk
product: SD/MMC
vendor: Generic-
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@13:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
version: 1.00
serial: 2012090114345300
capabilities: removable
configuration: ansiversion=6 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
*-medium
physical id: 0
logical name: /dev/sda
*-storage
description: Non-Volatile memory controller
product: NVMe SSD Controller SM961/PM961
vendor: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:3c:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: storage pm msi pciexpress msix nvm_express bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=nvme latency=0
resources: irq:16 memory:ec000000-ec003fff

  • hdparm command is used to set or get various SATA/IDE device parameters. Refer the manual pages of hdparm for more details man hdparm. 

      The `-H` option is used to read  the temperature from some (mostly Hitachi) drives.
            
  # hdparm -H /dev/sda
                
  /dev/sda:
  SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0d 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
   drive temperature (celsius) is:  under -20
   drive temperature in range:  yes

  • sg_inq command by default sends a SCSI INQUIRY command to the given device and then outputs the response.

    # sg_inq /dev/sdb 
standard INQUIRY:
  PQual=0  Device_type=0  RMB=0  version=0x05  [SPC-3]
    [SPI: Clocking=0x0  QAS=0  IUS=0]
    length=255 (0xff)   Peripheral device type: disk
 Vendor identification: COMPELNT
 Product identification: Compellent Vol  
 Product revision level: 0606
 Unit serial number: 00032ca6-00000016

  • Check from /sys filesytem for various parameter of a device where sdX is a LUN or individual hard drive.

    # cat /sys/block/sdi/device/model 
Compellent Vol

  • Server log files such as /var/log/dmesg , /var/log/messages record the errors if any medium or I/O error or Hardware error occur. Referring these files will help to identify the disk details.

  • A success status of any of the above is not equivalent to no problems but rather you'd need to run {vendor specific} hardware diagnostics to have more confidence that there isn't a problem.*

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