S.M.A.R.T. Tools for Command Line, Windows and Linux

article #447, updated 4283 days ago

Here is a great set of tools for hard drive status retrieval and monitoring:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki

The install for Windows is here:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Download#Windows-InstalltheWindowspackage

On Windows, if you can get a command prompt on a remote machine, just copy over ‘smartctl.exe’ from the default install, run it like this:

smartctl --scan

and it will give you a list of IDE/ATA/SCSI drives. /dev/sd* and /dev/hd* will be actual hard drives, CD/DVD drives, tape drives, or RAID volumes; it won’t give useful info for anything but hard drives. Usually a single hard drive will be “/dev/sda”. You can get the health info for /dev/sda with:

smartctl -H /dev/sda

If it doesn’t pass the test, or if it gives any caveats after saying that its test passed, you have a drive whose hours are likely numbered!!!

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