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Once authenticated, the testing will begin. You will be required to enter your sudo password to continue on with the test. Short-A collection of test routines that have the highest chance of detecting drive problems.Įxtended-Tests complete disk surface and performs various test routines built into the drive.Ĭonveyance-Identify damage incurred during transporting of drive. When you click the Start Self-test button, a drop-down menu will appear, from which you can choose one of three tests: To run a new test, click the Start Self-test button.įigure 3: The most recent test results for this particular SSD came up OK. If SMART isn’t enabled, click the slider to enable. You should also see that the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) option is enabled (slider in the top right of the window). In the new window, you should see the results of the last test run (Figure 3). Click on the gear icon and then, from the drop-down, select SMART Data & Self-Tests… (Figure 2). You should automatically see a quick Assessment of the drive (size, partitioning, Serial number, health, and temp). To do so, open up GNOME Disks and select the disk you want to test. Otherwise, it’ll be up to you to know which drives are SSDs and which are Standard.įigure 2: To run a test, select the SMART Data & Self-Tests… option. The SSDs will not be labeled any differently than the standard drives (unless the manufacturer included SSD in the name (as you see with the INTEL 120 GB SSD on my system-labeled SSDSC2BW120A4). The GNOME Disks main window is laid out quite well (Figure 1 above).įrom here you should see all of your attached drives. Go through your desktop menu, locate the app, and click to launch. Type your sudo password and hit the Enter key Issue the command sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility The installation of GNOME Disks can be done from a single command. If you’re using a non-Ubuntu-based distribution, the installation can be achieved by swapping out the package manager used on your system (i.e. In fact, I will demonstrate GNOME Disks from my Elementary OS Freya desktop. GNOME Disk is not limited to distributions running GNOME. Let’s install GNOME Disks and use it to test the health of your installed SSDs. Get a quick glimpse of your drive’s healthĪll from a handy, user-friendly GUI tool. Thanks to a very handy tool called GNOME Disks, you can get a quick glimpse of your drive health and run standard tests on the drive. Does that mean Linux users must remain in the dark as to their drive health? No. However, most of that software is, as you might expect, Windows-only. Many SSDs you purchase are shipped with software that can be used to monitor said health. After all, your data depends on the storing drives being sound and running properly.
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With no moving parts to wear out, these drives can (effectively) enjoy a longer life than standard platter-based drives.Įven though these drives are not prone to mechanical failure, you will still want to keep tabs on their health.
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They are faster, and the latest iterations are more reliable than traditional drives.
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