Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART

Linux Journal has an article introducing Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART). SMART is avaivalable in many Linux distros, including Slackware, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo, Conectiva ,and RedHat.

To install on Gentoo, do:

root# emerge -pv smartmontools

To install on Ubuntu, do:

Start Synaptic and search for smartmontools, and then install the the tool. Or use apt-get, or aptitude to install if you wish. If you are using Ubuntu as your desktop, you can also install the GUI tool "smart-notifier".

After installation, you will get two utilities: smartctl and smartd. You can man each command to see the usage.

Run "smartctl -a /dev/sda" to get a full report on your disk /dev/sda.