Hard drives do not last forever. Scrutiny is a dashboard that constantly monitors the physical health of your LocalNode's internal SSD and any attached USB drives, warning you of impending failure before you lose data.
Overview
Every modern hard drive has a built-in self-reporting system called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). It tracks things like temperature, bad sectors, and power cycles. Scrutiny reads this raw data, analyzes it against historical failure models, and translates it into a simple "Passed" or "Failed" dashboard.
Step 1: Accessing the Scrutiny dashboard
Go to your LocalNode dashboard at http://localnode.local.
Click the Scrutiny app icon.
The main dashboard will load, showing a list of every drive connected to the system.
You will see the internal 1TB NVMe SSD at the top. If you have any external USB drives plugged in, they will appear below it. The most important column is the "Status" column, which should be a green circle with a checkmark.
Click on the name of your internal drive (e.g., /dev/nvme0n1) to see its detailed health report.
Temperature: SSDs run hotter than traditional spinning drives. Anything under 60°C (140°F) is perfectly healthy. If it constantly spikes above 70°C, your LocalNode might be in a location without enough airflow.
Available Spare: This is the most critical metric for an SSD. SSDs degrade slightly every time you write data to them. They have "spare" hidden storage to replace dead sectors. If this number drops below 50%, the drive is dying and must be replaced immediately.
Power On Hours: Exactly how long the drive has been spinning/running in its lifetime.
💡 Tip: Don't panic if you see high "Power On Hours". A quality SSD is designed to run 24/7 for 5 to 10 years without issue.
Step 3: Running manual health tests
Scrutiny checks the drive's health every 15 minutes automatically, but you can force the drive to perform a rigorous self-test.
On the drive detail page, click the Self Tests tab at the top.
Click the dropdown menu and select Short Test.
Click Start Test.
The Short Test takes about 2 minutes and checks the electrical and mechanical performance. We do not recommend running the "Extended Test" on the internal SSD unless you suspect a failure, as it can cause excessive wear on the drive.
⚠️ Warning: Some cheap external USB enclosures block S.M.A.R.T. data from passing through the USB cable. If your external drive shows up in Scrutiny but the status says "Unknown", the drive is likely fine, but the cheap plastic enclosure is preventing Scrutiny from reading the data.
