You know, Herman, there is a very specific type of silence that only occurs when a home server dies. It is not just the lack of fan noise. It is the sound of all your local services, your backups, and your media libraries just... vanishing. It is a heavy silence.
Oh, I know that silence well, Corn. It is the sound of a looming weekend spent in the terminal, trying to figure out if you can salvage the data or if you are starting from scratch. Herman Poppleberry here, and I have to say, our housemate Daniel has had a rough week with exactly that. He has been hunting for replacement parts all over Jerusalem, which is never as easy as you want it to be when you are in a rush. He was actually spotted in Givat Shaul yesterday looking for a specific workstation board.
It really makes you think about how much we take for granted. We monitor our CPU temperatures, we check our RAM usage, but the motherboard? It is the literal foundation of the whole system, and yet most of us treat it like a passive piece of plastic until the magic smoke escapes. Daniel's prompt today is such a good reality check. He wants to know if there are actual utilities for checking motherboard health, and while we are at it, how reliable those monitoring tools for NVMe drives and GPUs actually are.
It is a great question because motherboard failure is often the most mysterious. When a power supply fails, usually it is a binary state. It works or it does not. When a hard drive fails, you get clicking or read errors. But a motherboard? It can fail in a thousand tiny, subtle ways before it finally gives up the ghost.
Right, and I think that is where we should start. Is there actually a way to monitor the health of a motherboard, or are we just waiting for it to die? Because unlike a hard drive, which has specific self-monitoring attributes, the motherboard seems like a black box to most users.
It is definitely more of a black box, but it is not completely opaque. The first thing to understand is that motherboard monitoring is really about monitoring the telemetry from dozens of different sensors scattered across the board. On a modern motherboard, you have voltage regulators, chipset sensors, and thermal probes. The most common way to access this on a Linux system, which I know Daniel is running for his home server, is through a suite called lm-sensors.
I remember we talked about lm-sensors way back in the early days of the show. It is a classic. But does it actually tell you if the board is failing, or does it just tell you that it is currently hot?
That is the distinction, isn't it? Most people use it for real-time monitoring, but the health aspect comes from looking at the trends. For example, your voltage rails. Your motherboard takes power from the PSU and converts it into various voltages for different components. You have your twelve volt, five volt, and three point three volt rails. If you start seeing those voltages fluctuate or drop below a certain threshold, say more than five percent, that is a massive red flag. It means the capacitors or the voltage regulator modules, or VRMs, are starting to degrade.
So, it is less about a single health score and more about noticing when the baseline changes. If my twelve volt rail has been rock solid at twelve point one volts for three years and suddenly it is dipping to eleven point five under load, that is my early warning sign?
Exactly. And that is why logging is more important than just checking a dashboard once a month. If you are not logging that data to something like Prometheus or even just a simple text file, you will never notice the slow drift until the system starts rebooting randomly. Another big one is the chipset temperature. People often ignore the Southbridge or the main chipset. If that starts creeping up over time while your ambient temperature stays the same, it could mean the thermal interface material under that tiny heatsink has dried out or the chip itself is starting to draw more current due to internal degradation.
That is interesting. But what about the physical side? I know we are talking about software utilities, but is there anything a utility can pick up that relates to physical wear? I am thinking of the old capacitor plague from twenty years ago. Obviously, we have solid capacitors now, but they still fail, don't they?
They do. While a software utility cannot see a bulging capacitor, it can see the result of one. One indicator that people often miss is the clock drift or BIOS battery voltage. Most motherboards have a sensor for the CMOS battery. If you see that voltage dropping below two point eight volts, you are going to start having weird boot issues. But more importantly, modern motherboards often have what we call IPMI or a BMC, which stands for Baseboard Management Controller. This is mostly on server-grade boards, which is what Daniel was looking at for his replacement.
Right, we talked about IPMI in episode four hundred and ten when we were discussing server resurrection. For those who missed it, that is basically a tiny computer inside your computer that monitors everything even when the main system is off.
Precisely. If you have a board with IPMI, you get a much deeper level of health monitoring. It logs chassis intrusions, power supply failures, and even ECC memory errors. If your motherboard starts reporting a high number of corrected bits in your RAM, that is often a sign that the memory controller on the motherboard or the CPU is struggling, or the traces on the board are picking up interference. That is a proactive health check that most consumer boards just do not offer in a user-friendly way. For Linux users, keep an eye on the asus-ec-sensors driver updates. We just saw some great upstream support for newer workstation boards like the Pro WS TRX fifty-SAGE, which exposes VRM and chipset telemetry that used to be hidden.
So for someone like Daniel, or anyone building a home server, the takeaway is that if you want real health monitoring, you almost have to buy a board with a dedicated management controller. Otherwise, you are just looking at voltage fluctuations and hoping you catch the drift in time.
That is the hard truth of it. On consumer boards, you are basically a detective looking for clues. On server boards, you have a doctor living inside the machine. But let's move on to something that people think is easier to monitor, but might actually be more deceptive. Storage. Specifically, NVMe and SSD health. Daniel asked if these tools are reliable and worth using. What has your experience been with those smart checks, Corn?
It is funny you ask, because I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with SMART data. For the listeners, SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. In theory, it is supposed to tell you exactly when your drive is going to die. In practice, I have seen drives with a hundred percent health rating in SMART just... stop existing the next day. And I have seen drives with thousands of reallocated sectors chug along for another five years.
That is the great irony of SMART. It is very good at reporting that a drive has already failed, but it is hit or miss at predicting it. However, with NVMe and modern SSDs, the metrics have changed. We are no longer looking for mechanical failures like head crashes. We are looking at NAND flash wear.
Right, and that is where the "Percentage Used" attribute comes in. Unlike old hard drives, SSDs have a very specific lifespan based on how much data you write to them. Total Bytes Written, or TBW. Herman, how much should we actually trust that percentage? If my drive says it has used ninety percent of its life, should I be panicking?
Not necessarily panicking, but you should be planning. The "Percentage Used" in an NVMe SMART report is actually quite reliable because it is based on the controller's internal tracking of erase cycles. When that hits a hundred percent, it doesn't mean the drive will instantly turn into a brick. It means the manufacturer no longer guarantees that the NAND will hold data reliably. Most drives will actually go way past that, sometimes to two hundred or three hundred percent, but you are living on borrowed time.
Is there a specific utility you recommend for this? I know a lot of people just use the manufacturer's tool, like Samsung Magician or Western Digital Dashboard. Are those better than the open-source alternatives?
If you are on Windows, the manufacturer tools are great because they can often access proprietary attributes that generic tools can't. They also handle firmware updates, which is actually a huge part of "health." We saw this just last year with the Windows eleven twenty-four H two update, where a specific firmware bug in Phison and InnoGrit controllers was causing drives to simply disappear when they got more than eighty percent full. A firmware update was the only cure.
Oh, I remember that. That was a mess. It really highlights that "health" isn't just a physical property; it's a software one too. What about Linux users? Daniel is likely using smartctl from the smartmontools package. Is that enough?
smartctl is the gold standard. If you run smartctl dash a on an NVMe drive, you get a very clean output. The things I tell people to look at are the Available Spare and the Media and Data Integrity Errors. If Available Spare drops below one hundred percent, it means the drive has started using its backup flash cells to replace dead ones. That is your early warning sign. If Media and Data Integrity Errors is anything other than zero, stop what you are doing and back up your data immediately. That means the controller has encountered errors it couldn't fix with its internal error correction.
That is a very concrete takeaway. Zero is the only acceptable number for integrity errors. But here is a question for you, Herman. What about the "Sudden Death" syndrome? I feel like SSDs are much more prone to just disappearing from the BIOS entirely compared to old spinning disks. Does any monitoring tool catch the precursors to a controller failure?
Sadly, almost never. Controller failure is usually electrical or a firmware crash. It is like a heart attack versus a slow aging process. Monitoring the TBW and the spare cells is like monitoring your cholesterol. It tells you the risk, but it doesn't predict the sudden lightning bolt. This is why we always say in this house, and we said it in episode four hundred and eighteen, RAID is not a backup. You monitor for health so you can replace the drive gracefully, but you back up because hardware is inherently capricious.
Capricious. That is a very poetic way to describe a piece of silicon that just decided to stop working on a Tuesday afternoon. So, storage monitoring is worth it for the wear-leveling data, but it won't save you from a catastrophic controller failure. Now, what about the big one? GPUs. Daniel specifically asked about NVIDIA cards. With the rise of AI and local model hosting, people are pushing their GPUs harder than ever. How do we monitor a GPU's health without just waiting for artifacts to appear on the screen?
This is where it gets really interesting because GPUs are probably the most sophisticated pieces of hardware in your system in terms of self-telemetry. If you are using an NVIDIA card, the primary tool is nvidia-smi, which stands for NVIDIA System Management Interface. Most people just use it to check their VRAM usage, but it has a wealth of health data if you know where to look.
I use nvidia-smi all the time, but I usually just look at the temperature. Is there a "health" flag in there?
There is actually a section for "Retiring Pages." This is something most people don't know about. Modern NVIDIA GPUs, especially the data center ones but also the high-end consumer ones, can track memory errors in their VRAM. If a specific part of the VRAM starts failing, the driver can "retire" those pages, effectively marking them as bad so they aren't used. If you see the retired pages count start to climb, your GPU memory is dying.
Wait, that is incredible. So it is like the reallocated sectors on a hard drive, but for your graphics memory?
Exactly. On consumer cards, you might see this reported as "Remapped Rows." You can see this by running nvidia-smi with the query-gpu flag. Another thing to watch is the "Power Draw" and "Throttle Reason." If your GPU is throttling and the reason is "Thermal," but your temperatures look okay, it might mean the hotspot temperature or the VRAM temperature is too high. This is especially critical on the newer Blackwell cards like the RTX fifty ninety, where the GDDR seven memory runs fast and hot.
That is a huge point. I have seen so many people focus on the GPU core temperature, which might be a comfortable sixty-five degrees, while their memory is screaming at one hundred and ten degrees because the thermal pads aren't making good contact.
Right, and that high heat over time will absolutely kill the card. If you are on Windows, a tool like H W Info sixty four is essential because it shows you that "GPU Memory Junction Temperature." For Daniel's server, he should be looking at the nvidia-smi output for those memory errors. If you are seeing "Uncorrected ECC Errors" on a card that supports ECC, or "Remapped Rows" on a consumer card, that card is on its way out.
Does overclocking or, more importantly for server users, undervolting affect these health readings? I know a lot of people undervolt their GPUs to keep them cool in a server rack.
Undervolting is generally great for health because heat is the number one killer of electronics. The only risk is instability. But there is a misconception that running a GPU at a hundred percent load twenty-four seven is what kills it. It is actually the thermal cycling, the heating up and cooling down over and over, that causes the solder joints to crack. In a server environment, where the GPU is often at a constant temperature, they can actually last a very long time.
So the "health" of a GPU is really about temperature management and monitoring the VRAM integrity. It feels like the common thread here across motherboards, storage, and GPUs is that we have moved past the era of "is it on or off" and into the era of "how much margin do we have left."
That is a perfect way to put it. We are monitoring the margin. For the motherboard, the margin is the voltage stability. For the SSD, the margin is the spare NAND cells. For the GPU, the margin is the memory integrity and thermal headroom.
So, if we were to give Daniel a "health check toolkit" for his new server, what does that look like? On the Linux side, I am hearing lm-sensors for the board, smartmontools for the drives, and nvidia-smi for the GPU. Is there anything that ties it all together?
If he wants to be professional about it, he should set up a small instance of Netdata or Prometheus with Grafana. These tools have plugins for all the utilities we just mentioned. Instead of running a command manually, he can have a dashboard that shows him a graph of his twelve volt rail, his SSD life remaining, and his GPU memory temperature. He can even set up alerts to send him a message on Telegram or Discord if any of those margins start to shrink.
That sounds like a much better way to spend a weekend than what he is doing now, which is hunting for a new motherboard in the industrial zones of Givat Shaul.
Definitely. And it is worth noting that some of these tools can even predict failure based on the rate of change. If your SSD life drops from ninety-nine percent to ninety-eight percent in a year, that is fine. If it drops from ninety-nine to ninety-eight in a week, the tool can alert you that something is wrong with your logging configuration or a process is runaway-writing to the disk.
That is a great point. Sometimes "hardware failure" is actually "software abuse." I once had a log file grow to five hundred gigabytes because of a misconfigured service, and it nearly killed a perfectly good SSD. If I had been monitoring the "Percentage Used" metric daily, I would have caught it in an hour.
Exactly. Hardware health is often the symptom, not the cause. But to answer Daniel's final question about whether these tools are "worth using," I would say they are absolutely worth it, but with the caveat that they are not crystal balls. They are more like the gauges in a car. They tell you if the engine is overheating or if the oil pressure is low, but they won't tell you if you're about to hit a nail in the road.
I think that is a very grounded perspective. Don't let the tools give you a false sense of security, but use them to eliminate the predictable failures. If you can eliminate the predictable ones, you have much more energy to deal with the unpredictable ones.
Well said, Corn. And honestly, for anyone listening who hasn't checked their drive health in a while, consider this your sign. Download a utility, check those spare cells, and maybe look at your voltages. It takes five minutes and could save you five days of downtime.
And if you are in Jerusalem like us and your server does die, maybe give Daniel a call. He probably knows exactly which shops have the best stock by now. He has done the legwork for all of us.
Poor Daniel. But hey, at least he gets a fresh start with a new board. There is something satisfying about a clean build, even if it was forced upon you by a motherboard meltdown. Before we wrap up, I just want to remind everyone that we have a massive archive of these kinds of deep dives. If you enjoyed this hardware talk, you should definitely check out episode four hundred and eighteen where we go even deeper into RAID configurations and home server resilience. You can find all of that at myweirdprompts.com.
And if you have a second, we would really appreciate a review on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It genuinely helps the show reach more people who might be staring at a dead server and wondering what went wrong.
It really does. A quick rating makes a huge difference. Thanks for the prompt, Daniel, and good luck with the assembly. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Thanks for listening, everyone. We will see you in the next one. Wait, Herman, I just remembered one more specific utility for Linux users. It is called nvtop.
Oh, nvtop is great! It is like top or htop, but specifically for your GPU. It gives you those beautiful little graphs in the terminal. It is perfect for Daniel if he wants to keep an eye on things while he is working.
Exactly. It makes monitoring feel a lot more like being in The Matrix. Highly recommended. Okay, we are definitely over our time now. Success! Talk to you later, Herman.
Later, Corn. This has been My Weird Prompts, episode four hundred and eighty-three. Check out the show notes at myweirdprompts.com for links to all the tools we mentioned.
And don't forget to back up! Always. Bye!
Bye!
