smartmontools

Smartmontools

smartmontools is a set of open source utilities that monitor the health of disk drives and predict drive failures, compatible with most types of hard drives. It reads SMART data to detect and report on various drive attributes related to reliability, such as reallocated sectors c
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smartmontools: Open Source Hard Drive Monitoring Tool

Monitor hard drive health with smartmontools, a set of open source utilities that detect reliability issues and predict failures by reading SMART data.

What is Smartmontools?

smartmontools is an open source software package that monitors internal Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) data on hard drives and solid-state drives to detect and predict drive failures.

It includes two utility programs - smartctl and smartd. smartctl is used to inspect and control SMART data on drives, while smartd is a daemon that monitors drives and notifies the user about reliability issues.

Some of the key features of smartmontools include:

  • Monitoring drive attributes like reallocated sector count, spin retry count, etc. that indicate drive health.
  • Logging SMART data over time to predict failure before it happens.
  • Configurable email alerts for reporting drive issues.
  • Support for most common types of hard drives (IDE, SATA, SCSI) and many SSDs.
  • Easy integration with monitoring tools like Nagios or Check_MK.
  • Open source software with contributions from drive vendors and the Linux community.

With its advanced health monitoring and failure prediction capabilities, smartmontools is an essential tool for monitoring drive health and preventing data loss in Linux systems.

Smartmontools Features

Features

  1. Monitoring of hard disk drive health
  2. Prediction of potential drive failures
  3. Reading and reporting of SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data
  4. Compatibility with most types of hard drives
  5. Detecting and reporting on various drive attributes related to reliability, such as reallocated sectors count

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open-source and free to use

Provides valuable insights into hard drive health

Helps identify potential issues before they lead to data loss

Supports a wide range of hard drive types and manufacturers

Cons

Command-line interface may not be user-friendly for some users

Requires technical knowledge to interpret and act on the reported data


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