New USB drives arrived for my Ceph cluster, and they’re not reporting SMART data. Again. After solving this problem in my October 2025 article, I need to update the configuration with new device IDs and share the lessons learned from running this solution across my entire cluster.
The bottom line: This was absolutely the right decision. SMART monitoring has already caught failing drives before they damaged data, and the performance trade-off is negligible compared to the stability benefits.