We’re bringing some SMART options back

Announcements
1

It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that the changes to SMART monitoring in TrueNAS 25.10 have been … controversial to say the least.

TrueNAS 25.10 removed the UI option to manually schedule SMART short and long testing. Notably, it didn’t “remove SMART” or prevent access to any of the more detailed metrics that were being polled by community scripts or solutions in the background. SMART has been, and will continue to be, actively used to monitor all connected disks. It will still react to critical alerts that require your attention, in conjunction with the much more reliable ZFS drive health monitoring and alerting.

These changes were made to streamline SMART monitoring and have greatly reduced the incidence of false-positive alerts. However, we understand that these changes didn’t perfectly align with the desires of the TrueNAS Home Lab Community for greater control and self-governance of their home built platforms.

So, the team is currently working on making some changes to TrueNAS to re-introduce some options to give you more advanced visibility and control mechanisms for manual scheduling of your SMART long and short testing tasks.

When will this happen?
We’re firming up the details. We’ll announce the official plans in March.

Are we just going to get the old cron-style scheduler back?
No. We want to make this something that’s able to be used by the community in their scripts and custom solutions - so think “API endpoints” and UI trigger buttons to start/view and not “manual CLI editing.”

I’m on TrueNAS 25.04, I don’t want to upgrade and “lose” SMART.
If you’re running 25.04 and have scheduled tests, you can upgrade to 25.10 and those tests will migrate and continue to run. TrueNAS will raise alerts on drives that fail a scheduled SMART short or long test, or trigger its threshold on a watched value. Again - TrueNAS 25.10 never “removed” SMART functionality.

I want to see every individual SMART statistic and graph it and trendline it over time and-
This was always possible, and still is - but it always required manual (or scripted) collection and parsing and will vary greatly depending on your drive models, firmware revisions, HBA/storage controller, device protocol, and an assortment of other factors.

Thank you for your attention.

  • Chris “HoneyBadger”
27 Likes
TrueNAS Hotfix, SMART Update, Proxmox Plugin, and Docker Networks | TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) E055
2

Could you - maybe - have a look on the Multi Report Tool which is great, please?

If you could integrate something with these features would be stunning.

See:

2 Likes
3

I’ll be the red t-shirt guy from blizzcon and ask: is this an early April fools joke? :rofl:

4 Likes
4

that’s actually in the draft notes but it got bumped to page 2 so I thought they didn’t want me to do it

redshirtguy
redshirtguy700×568 57.6 KB

“No.”

4 Likes
5

image
image500×1089 142 KB

10 Likes
6

I’m still on 24.10 because of this! :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, this is the least bad news I’ve heard in a bit, though I’m sure I’ll find something to complain about.

7

Thank you.

I think a lot of people on this forum are part of a corporate world and know that the messenger has to communicate a message regardless of what is going on in the back room. And manage the fallout.

I’ve not been around that long, but the…ending…to the feature request thread was a good indicator that the previous line was unlikely to coexist with a strong community presence from forum users.

As it stands, I’m mildly optimistic (I liked the UI for setting up tasks, I don’t understand why that was removed as it logically didn’t fit with the excuse that results are misinterpreted), but sitting on 25.04 whilst still putting in the work (migrated HA VM today, docker stack to be moved, working VM to be clonezilla’d) so that I can move swiftly away from Truenas in the future if there are further issues.

But maybe that’s a little further away than where we were yesterday, maybe a swift move to 26 is on the cards.

7 Likes
8

ty honeybadger for the detailed explanation.

i already understood based on the previous explanations nothing was truly gone. just that it was one step away from an easily clickable UI button to do the short/long smart test, or to view the detailed smart data.

to do those things, you still could, except, now instead of having the smart ui in truenas where u can do a few clicks, you instead had to go command line and type the commands in shell.

e.g.

check current s.m.a.r.t status check

smartctl -H /dev/sdx

do short smart test

smartctl -t short /dev/sdx

do long smart test

smartctl -t long /dex/sdx

it was there all along. but what they may have under-estimated, was the home labbers that may not be into commandline stuff, and would rather have these things more easily accessible via the UI with a few clicks. like maybe they want to run a manual smart test but don’t know how. or maybe they dont read forums and realize it does still run scheduled smart tests. or… maybe they want to be control when it runs those tests, instead of it being set to some default outside their control?

I myself prefer clicking and ui, but i am still aware of the commandline stuff, and with google ai search you can figure out what to do. But…. this changed caused the most anxiety for the less tech savvy users i imagine?

also for people who thought scrutiny was abandonware, i noticed a recent update 2 weeks ago. to install that go to truenas apps, select it, then install. to access web ui for it, click on the app link also shown there after it’s installed.

2 Likes
9

I am one of those :smiley:

10

Covered here:

Otherwise, the announcement is good news… but it’s hard not to make a parallel with British politics.

5000
50003800×3040 1010 KB

1 Like
11

This is good news.:partying_face: I was wondering if there was any new information regarding disks spinning down.

4 Likes
12

Let me know if this should be a feature request.

I’m rather opinionated on the changes to SMART in 25.10 but as a gesture of goodwill, may I recommend something like a bright orange banner in the SMART webUI (however that returns) with something like…

“iXsystems recommends/cautions against the use of SMART tests and recommends most installations rely on ZFS scrubs. Read more here.”

…then link to (version-specific) documentation on iXsystems’ rationale? This would accomplish a few things and be a reasonable compromise:

  1. It points to new users that ZFS scrubs are the priority (I don’t think any reasonable person with all the facts would disagree with this).
  2. It articulates iXsystems’ rationale in the documentation and allows unsure users to become better informed before making decisions.
  3. It comes as a recommendation but not a rule.