SMART Disks - Controlling and monitoring SMART SCSI disks with smartctl

What are SMART disks?

SMART is an abbreviation for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART). SMART system is built into many ATA-3, ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives.

What is smartctl?
According to manual entry for smartctl,

smartctl is a command line utility designed to perform SMART tasks such as printing the SMART self-test and error logs, and enabling and disabling SMART automatic testing. Note: if the user issues a SMART command that is (apparently) not implemented by the device, smartctl will print a warning message but issue the command anyway. This should not cause problems: unimplemented SMART commands issued to a drive are ignored and return an error.

Check the health of a disk drive with smartctl

To check the health of a disk drive, use smartctl with -H option.

What does the -H option for smartctl do?
Again, the "man" is your best friend. The -H option checks for system health:

-H, --health
Check: Ask the device to report its SMART health status or pending TapeAlert messages. SMART status is based on information that it has gathered from online and offline tests, which were used to determine/update its SMART vendor-specific Attribute values. TapeAlert status is obtained by reading the TapeAlert log page.

If the device reports failing health status, this means either that the device has already failed, or that it is predicting its own failure within the next 24 hours. If this happens, use the â-aâ option to get more information, and get your data off the disk and someplace safe as soon as you can.

Here is how you would check the health of a hard disk device. Note, the hard disk drive temperatures in the output

[root@plain scripts]# smartctl -H /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.1-11 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

SMART Sense: Ok!
Current Drive Temperature: 34 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 65 C
Manufactured in week 34 of year 2002
Current start stop count: 93 times
Recommended start stop count: 10000 times

We can use the -a option to print all SMART information about the disk device.

[root@plain scripts]# smartctl -a /dev/sda

smartctl version 5.1-11 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: FUJITSU  MAP3735NP        Version: 5605
Serial number: UPG3P28001M1
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Tue Nov 15 20:14:03 2005 CST
Device supports SMART and is Enabled
Temperature Warning Enabled
SMART Sense: Ok!
Current Drive Temperature:     34 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        65 C
Manufactured in week 34 of year 2002
Current start stop count:      93 times
Recommended start stop count:  10000 times

Error counter log:
          Errors Corrected    Total      Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
              delay:       [rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
            minor | major  rewrites]  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0     1027         0         0          0      60202.631           0
write:         0        1         0         0          0      15293.201           0
verify:        0        0         0         0          0          0.000           0

Non-medium error count:      168

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Background long   Completed                   -     0                   - [-   -    -]
# 2  Background short  Completed                   -     0                   - [-   -    -]

Long (extended) Self Test duration: 2191 seconds [36.5 minutes]

If your disk has encountered any errors, they should appear in the output. To check your hard drive for bad sectors, use

badblocks -v /dev/sda

SCSI disk linux Hard Drive

smartctl