How to Monitor a Newly Installed Hard Drive390

Installing a new hard drive can be a daunting task, but it's important to make sure that your new drive is functioning properly. One of the best ways to do this is to monitor the drive's performance using a monitoring tool. In this article, we'll show you how to monitor a newly installed hard drive using a free and open-source tool called SMARTmontools.

What is SMART?

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a technology that is built into most modern hard drives. SMART monitors the drive's health and performance and can provide early warning signs of potential problems. SMART data can be used to identify issues such as bad sectors, impending drive failures, and performance degradation.

Installing SMARTmontools

The first step is to install SMARTmontools. SMARTmontools is available for a variety of operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Once you have downloaded and installed SMARTmontools, you can open a terminal window and run the following command to check if your system supports SMART:```
smartctl -i /dev/sda
```

If your system supports SMART, you should see output similar to the following:```
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5153 [x86_64-linux-5.15.0-47-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Barracuda 7200.14
Device Model: ST3320620AS
Serial Number: 5F6W6G65
LU WWN Device Identifier: 5 0014ee 35c5f89b6
Firmware Version: CC4C
User Capacity: 320,072,933,120 bytes [320 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes
Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gbps (current: 6.0 Gbps)
Local Time is: Fri May 13 17:18:34 2022 PST
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate POHs 100 100 051 0
3 Spin_Up_Time POHs 100 100 024 0
4 Start_Stop_Count POHs 100 100 051 77
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct POHs 100 100 033 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate POHs 100 100 033 0
9 Power_On_Hours - 99 99 000 4877
10 Spin_Retry_Count POHs 100 100 033 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count POHs 100 100 051 206
184 End-to-End_Error - 100 100 099 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect - 100 100 000 0
188 Command_Timeout - 100 100 000 0
189 High_Fly_Writes - 100 100 000 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel - 78 78 000 35
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate - 100 100 000 0
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count - 100 100 000 3
193 Load_Cycle_Count - 100 100 000 206
194 Temperature_Celsius - 66 60 000 35
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered - 100 100 000 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector - 100 100 000 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable - 100 100 000 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count - 100 100 000 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate - 100 100 000 0
```

Monitoring SMART Data

Once you have installed SMARTmontools, you can use the `smartctl` command to monitor your SMART data. The following command will display a summary of the SMART data for your hard drive:```
smartctl -A /dev/sda
```

The output of this command will look something like this:```
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5153 [x86_64-linux-5.15.0-47-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Barracuda 7200.14
Device Model: ST3320620AS
Serial Number: 5F6W6G65
LU WWN Device Identifier: 5 0014ee 35c5f89b6
Firmware Version: CC4C
User Capacity: 320,072,933,120 bytes [320 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes
Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gbps (current: 6.0 Gbps)
Local Time is: Fri May 13 17:18:34 2022 PST
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate POHs 100 100 051 0
3 Spin_Up_Time POHs 100 100 024 0
4 Start_Stop_Count POHs 100 100 051 77
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct POHs 100 100 033 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate POHs 100 100 033 0
9 Power_On_Hours - 99 99 000 4877
10 Spin_Retry_Count POHs 100 100 033 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count POHs 100 100 051 206
184 End-to-End_Error - 100 100 099 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect - 100 100 000 0
188 Command_Timeout - 100 100 000 0
189 High_Fly_Writes - 100 100 000 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel - 78 78 000 35
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate - 100 100 000 0
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count - 100 1