Disk failure sentinel powered by kernel telemetry
SMART — Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology — is a monitoring system built into hard drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) that tracks reliability indicators to anticipate hardware failures before they happen.
Note
NVMe drives don't implement classic ATA SMART attributes. Instead they expose an equivalent telemetry log page (Log Identifier 0x02) via NVMe admin commands, reporting fields like temperature, percentage used, available spare, and media/data integrity errors rather than numbered ATA attributes.
The name is inspired by the Achaemenid Persian "Immortals". An elite 10,000-strong unit where any fallen soldier was immediately replaced, keeping the army force permanently at full strength.
Hardware eventually fails, but your system shouldn't have to. By predicting drive failures and swapping hardware out before it breaks, your storage infrastructure stays continuously healthy and uninterrupted to give your data the same seamless, "immortal" continuity.
Yes and deliberately so. Immortal came to me toward the end of an 8-month internship at Corvus Energy, where I built a fairly advanced Nix-based operating system for ESS Pack Controllers. In the process, went deep into kernel internals and low-level system utilities. That exposure is where the idea came from.
Immortal is purpose-built for the systems that don't get to rest. Examples include but are not limited to: homelabs, servers, and data centers running sustained 24/7 Disk I/O. These are exactly the environments where a drive is most likely to degrade quietly under load and where catching that degradation early helps a lot with planning, migration, and troubleshooting procedures.