SMART disk monitoring How-To

[Archangel-Amael]

A small tutorial for getting S.M.A.R.T. disk monitoring.
You can monitor the health and temperature of your hard disks
Note this will only work if your disks support the S.M.A.R.T. feature.

root@dorkbox:~#apt-get install smartmontools
root@dorkbox:~#apt-get install hddtemp

When hddtemp runs it will pop up a window about running the deamon at startup it recommends not to do so, you can choose either way.
If you want to reconfigure this just run dpkg-reconfigure hddtemp to do so.

root@dorkbox:~#apt-get install sensors-applet

You can add a panel applet with this.

There is a front end of for smartmontools, to install GSmartControl using the package available here:

Then use

root@dorkbox:~#dpkg -i gsmartcontrol_0.8.4+nmu1_i386.deb

to install it.
There is also an AMD64 package if needed.
once it finishes running dpkg will complain about needing some missing libraries, just

root@dorkbox:~#run apt-get -f install

and the gsmartcontrol will install them as well.

To run the app
go to: K menu> System> GSMartControl

There may an easier way to do this, it was just the easiest that I found at the moment. Hit back if you need some help or have problems.
Thank you

[imported_Deathray]

Nice tutorial Archangel, never thought about S.M.A.R.T in Linux as I've always been use to Windows taking advantage of S.M.A.R.T automatically .

[Archangel-Amael]

Nice tutorial Archangel, never thought about S.M.A.R.T in Linux as I've always been use to Windows taking advantage of S.M.A.R.T automatically .

Thanks Deathray glad you enjoyed it.

I know that a lot of newer mother boards take advantage of the tech too. But most people will not look at their bios everyday.

[streaker69]

Thanks Deathray glad you enjoyed it.

I know that a lot of newer mother boards take advantage of the tech too. But most people will not look at their bios everyday.

On a similar note, I just configured Conky to read the LM Sensor information. So now I can display Fan Speeds, CPU and Motherboard temps. I was gonna work on using the SMART to display similar in conky as well.

[Archangel-Amael]

On a similar note, I just configured Conky to read the LM Sensor information. So now I can display Fan Speeds, CPU and Motherboard temps. I was gonna work on using the SMART to display similar in conky as well.

After looking at this for a bit, I really found no relevant info on the net.
But I suppose a cron job could be used to run the smartctl
the output of course could then be read by conky.
I did however try running something like this:

root@dorkbox:~# logsave /tmp/smartout.txt watch -n 15 smartctl --all /dev/hda

Then use conky to read it by inserting the following into the conky config file

${exec cat /tmp/smartout.txt}

It should be obvious why that wouldn't be the best.