What if we want to enable it? All we have to do is to run smartctl with the -s option, using “on” as argument: $ sudo smartctl -s on /dev/sda From there we can see that the device has SMART capabilities and that, in this case, SMART support is disabled. What interests us the most, however is the content of the last two lines. We can see that basic information are displayed such as the device family, model, sector sizes, etc. SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s) Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physicalĭevice is: In smartctl database ĪTA Version is: ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated) The output of the command is the following: = START OF INFORMATION SECTION = To perform this operation we can run the smartctl utility with the -i option (short for -info): $ sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda The first thing we want to check is if S.M.A.R.T support is active on the device. Let’s become familiar with the smartctl utility. If Archlinux is your favorite distribution, you can use pacman: $ sudo pacman -S smartmontools On recent versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora we can use dnf: $ sudo dnf install smartmontools If you are running on Debian or one of its derivatives, like Ubuntu or Mint, for example, you can run: $ sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get install smartmontools $ – requires given linux-commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged userĪs mentioned before the smartmontools package is available in the repositories of all the major Linux distributions, therefore all we have to do to install it, is to use our favorite package manager. # – requires given linux-commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command The smartmontools package (see instructions) Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used How to check an hard drive health from the command line using smartctl Software requirements and conventions used Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions Category

Drive health checker