Drives & disk health

Bitsmith lists every drive it detects, whether it’s part of a storage space or sitting empty. Connect a drive (internal SATA/NVMe or external USB) and it appears within a few seconds.

Drive states

Drives that are part of a storage space are listed with that space. Every other drive gets a tile on the Storage page with a status and the one action that fits it:

• Healthy, empty and ready for new storage. Create storage with it.
• Adoptable, holds a ZFS pool from another system you can adopt.
• Copyable, holds files in a filesystem Bitsmith can read. Copy them into a storage space, then wipe the drive.
• Needs wipe, holds data Bitsmith can’t use as it is. Wipe it to reuse it.
• Unavailable, the system disk or a drive that is busy. The tile explains why.

Disk health (SMART)

Click a drive to open its detail page. Bitsmith reads the drive’s built-in health report (SMART) and shows:

• Overall health, PASSED, FAILED, or UNKNOWN.
• Temperature and power-on hours.
• Reallocated and pending sectors, early signs of a failing disk.
• Wear level for SSDs and NVMe drives.
• Model, serial, and firmware.

Expand Get more details for the full attribute table. A drive reporting FAILED or climbing reallocated sectors is one to replace soon; see Maintain & grow storage for replacing a drive in a protected space.

Wipe a drive

To reuse a drive that holds old data, choose Wipe drive to reuse on its tile. Every file on the drive will be permanently deleted and the drive will be ready for new storage. Bitsmith asks you to confirm before it starts.