A hard drive is a hardware component used in both personal computers and servers to store digital data. Abrupt failure of a hard drive might result in permanent data loss. Most hard drives use self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (SMART) to track various performance metrics and analyze their own health. However, not all SMART attributes are effective at detecting a failing hard drive, so network and server admins must monitor hard drive to ensure proper server performance and maintain network availability by avoiding sudden unanticipated failures and errors in hard drives.

Hard drives are widely regarded as dependable components because their mean time to failure ranges from one million to 1.5 million hours, which suggests a low annual failure rate. However, hard drives are the hardware component that’s changed most often in large-scale IT infrastructure, and in most data centers, a large percent of known failures have been caused by failed hard drives. Monitoring hard drive with a comprehensive hardware monitor to detect a failing one is critical for any business to ensure data availability and avoid irreversible data loss.

Let's take a closer look at different aspects of server hard drive monitoring.

Challenges in hard drive monitoring

Most IT networks and data centers use large numbers of hard drives as data storage devices, and it is increasingly challenging to monitor and maintain a storage system's dependability as the number of hard drives grows exponentially. The following are some of the challenges in hard drive monitor.

 
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