Development

Monitor disks with the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools

By Forrest Cook
March 11, 2008

The S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools (Smartmontools) is a cross-platform set of utilities that are able to monitor operating data from hard drives:

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure. It should run on any modern Darwin (Mac OSX), Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation, QNX, or Windows system.

Wikipedia defines SMART as the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology: "Mechanical failures, which are usually predictable failures, account for 60 percent of drive failure. The purpose of S.M.A.R.T. is to warn a user or system administrator of impending drive failure while time remains to take preventative action such as copying the data to a replacement device. Approximately 30% of failures can be predicted by S.M.A.R.T."

Version 5.38 of Smartmontools was recently announced. Improvements include:

Several Libata/Marvell driver improvements.
New additions to the drive database.
ATA-8 updates.
New Dragonfly support.
Support for the QNX operating system.
A new no-fork option for smartd.
Better support for systems with large numbers of disks.
Improvements to the descriptions of the SMART Attribute list.
A workaround for a Samsung firmware bug.
Improvements to the CCISS support system.
New selective self-test command line options.
Build system portability improvements.
Numerous bug fixes.

Building Smartmontools was straightforward. The code was downloaded and unpacked. The usual configure, make and make install steps were performed on an Ubuntu 7.04 system with no troubles. The operation instructions from the README file were followed and the software was able to discover data from the one hard drive on the test system. This example output shows the wide variety of drive information that Smartmontools can display. The drive appears to be healthy.

If you are a systems administrator who needs to keep track of hard drive reliability data, Smartmontools be able to provide some useful drive information. With the addition of a small amount of glue-logic scripting, it should not be too difficult to set up an automated drive monitoring system.

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