smartmontools

basic usage

I've had many hard drives fail over the years and one thing seems common -- such failures often happen without warning. smartmontools is a utility -- at one point lead developed by physicist Bruce Allen -- that allows you to monitor the health and status of running hard drives. It typically works best when the drives to be probed are directly connected to the host interface (via SATA, SAS, SCSI, ATA, etc.) as opposed to a peripheral high-speed interface (USB or FireWire external drive). I think it's wise to periodically run the command below to check the health of your drives as it can help you identify faulty ones before they fail outright.

Use the command below to view the status of a drive (where 'x' in 'sdx' corresponds to the appropriate drive):

# smartctl -a /dev/sdx

You can read more about S.M.A.R.T. and the various attributes on Wikipedia.