Questions around best practices around HDD integrity from 25.10 onwards (post-SMART GUI)

TrueNAS General
1

I just finished watching the discussion acknowledging the controversy surrounding removing the SMART test function being removed from the GUI in 25.10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuKwwPp8K-U&t=4s

I came in frustrated but leave attempting to keep an open mind (Apple comes to mind, pulling controversial features in the past that were often [not always] in hindsight, the correct decision), but with some questions:

  1. I understand ZFS and TrueNAS monitor more health components behind the scenes, including some SMART functionality, instead of just pass/fail, which is the reason for GUI removal. But if I purchase a used/refurbished disk, in the past I have always, before anything, run a long SMART test against it. What is the best practice with this now, just insert it normally and wait, or do it through the CLI? Is badblocks useful here? Or do I just run midclt call disk.smart_test LONG ...? That command returns null but then my disks go crazy so I guess something is happening. Which leads me to my next question:
  2. How can I see the status and/or results of past tests?
  3. How do I get notified of integrity failure? Under System → Alert settings I’ve seen a few that suggest:
  • Failed Selftest (Hardware)
  • Uncorrected Errors Detected (Hardware)
  • Pool Status Is Not Healthy (Storage)
  1. Are these “behind the scenes” tests are thorough as a LONG SMART test?

Thanks!

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I don’t see any reason to use the midclt commands for SMART tests or monitoring. smartctl -t long /dev/whatever, and then smartctl -a /dev/whatever once it’s finished (about which you need to guess, though it’ll give you an ETA when you start the test) to check the results.

As far as monitoring, since whatever TrueNAS is doing is now a black box, check out Joe’s Multi-Report script:

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That looks great thanks! Yeah I guess it being a black box is really the root of all my reservations. “What TrueNAS already tests is more granular” sounds great, but only if I can somehow see what that is.

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