SMART Data
No volume management tool would be complete without a built-in SMART data capability. QNAP really makes it easy to see what is going on with your drives and to administer your SMART data and drive testing. In Disk Management, click on H.D.D. SMART.
This NAS is sitting in my living room in the home entertainment cluster and has great airflow, so that drive temperature of 33° C /91° F is pretty good in my house. I’ve never tested these drives, so let’s set up the test schedule for weekly, Sunday morning at 0100 hours. Click on Settings.
I went ahead and turned on the testing, set Sunday at 0100 hours and then clicked on Apply to All HDD’s to set up the test schedule. Now I can rest assured knowing that my drives are being monitored for issues and tested every week.
Click on Hard Disk Information to see some high-level drive information. Here we have drive 3 and it shows the serial number, model number, capacity and firmware level. Very handy!
Let’s click on SMART Information to see what it is tracking about Disk 3:
It all looks good. If values were out of whack, TurboNAS would tell me in the Status column. Very nice indeed! But there is more! Click on System Status and then System Information.
It shows the status of the ethernet links (I only have one up in this location; I use two when the NAS is on the main switch in the basement), system and hard drive temps, memory usage, and some other nice-to-see data points about the system. Very handy!
Conclusion
QNAP TurboNAS is a very powerful tool for managing RAID/JBOD volumes. TurboNAS also has executed a very good and easy to understand implementation of SMART data in its dashboard. I am very impressed with the ease of use, power, and scope of the volume management and SMART data tools provided.
QNAP TurboNAS 3.5 Deep Dive Part One: ISCSI QNAP TurboNAS 3.5 Deep Dive Part Two: Users