Chris Moates' adventures in the land of Mox » hdsentinel http://www.mox.net The ramblings of Captain Overkill Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:05:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Quick hard drive health checks http://www.mox.net/2010/05/20/quick-hard-drive-health-checks/ http://www.mox.net/2010/05/20/quick-hard-drive-health-checks/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 20:22:04 +0000 cmoates http://www.mox.net/?p=163 Most computer geeks know about SMART, or at least have heard of SMART, the built in system in hard disks to monitor their health. The problem with SMART is that it’s data, not analysis. Unless you know how all the numbers work together, it’s not terribly useful information.

While trolling the unRAID forums today, I ran across an app called Hard Disk Sentinel. They have a range of applications available for a variety of hard disk monitoring, but their free Linux app is the one I’m writing about today. You simply download the binary and run it on a system as root, and you’ll get output like this:

HDD Device  0: /dev/sda
HDD Model ID : WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0
HDD Serial No: WD-WMAVU1631157
HDD Revision : 01.00A01
HDD Size     : 1430799 MB
Interface    : S-ATA II
Temperature  : 24 °C
Health       : 100 %
Performance  : 100 %
Power on time: 8 days, 22 hours
Est. lifetime: more than 1000 days

Pretty handy, and much more readable. Mind you this is an “at a glance” view of your disk, but it can point out a number of useful things, like which disks are oldest in your system, which are running hot, etc.

]]> http://www.mox.net/2010/05/20/quick-hard-drive-health-checks/feed/ 0