[Feature request] Display SMART health warnings as they occur via integration with smartd daemon and notify-send
Dear developers,
I have the following feature request: Monitor the SMART device health of all HDD and SSD drives on the system, and whenever an error occurs, display it as a notification on the GNOME Desktop. Also, build a nice graphical comprehensive menu that does not only display the SMART raw values, but "interprets" them for the novice user.
My reasoning behind this feature request: The user's data is the most important thing to protect. Drives can fail, no matter if they are mechanical (head crash, mechanical failure, reallocated or defective sectors) or electronical (wear leveling / number of writes on the NAND flash cells). All modern drives support SMART, yet it is only (if ever) checked by the UEFI when booting, never when the OS is running. Many users today use standby modes to conserve power or because of ease-of-use, so some people hardly reboot anymore. Other people reboot, but their UEFI does not check the SMART values or displays only critical values when failure is already imminent, not for example early-warning-signs like defective sectors. Errors can also occur after boot, while doing read/write-intensive tasks like copying files or video editing. So in summary, there are a lot of reasons to make SMART more transparent to the user and also monitor it in the background. SMART values are updated regularly by the drives, but they are hidden from the user and difficult to understand. They should instead be presented to the user in a graphical menu in an easy to understand way with instructions on what to do in case a drive is starting to fail.
Idea for implementation:
- smartd becomes a dependency of GNOME Disk Utility.
- User can activate SMART monitoring and set the most relevant settings graphically in a new "SMART monitoring" menu tab, e.g. located in the Hamburger menu. It could also be activated by default, since its a useful feature to have that can protect the data on the system from disk failure.
- If activated, smartd daemon does all the monitoring. Whenever an critical condition occurs (what parameters exactly must be met to cause such a condition, is defined by the user in the menu), smartd sends a message to GNOME Disk Utility.
- GNOME Disk Utility then processes the message and sets off a notification to the GNOME Desktop via notify-send. When the user clicks on the notification, GNOME Disk Utility opens, and presents a comprehendable, easy to understand summary!
Thanks to GNOME Disk Utility, the user can now see the "Health" status of their drives and, in case an error happens and they click on the warning notification, also the following information:
- What type of failure happened on which drives,
- that the user should backup all data on these drives immediately, and
- how the user can investigate the problem further.
Note: There once was a utility called "smart-notifier" which fulfilled a similar function. But this was back in the GNOME 2 days, and way before Wayland. It would be cool and most useful to have such a feature integrated properly into the GNOME Desktop Environment. The default should be that after GNOME is installed, all drives are automatically monitored. We could catch a lot of fatal drive failures early that way!
Thanks for reading! I'm sure this is difficult to implement, but nevertheless I wanted to suggest it.