3. Tools Overview

The primary tools to monitor S.M.A.R.T. capiable disk drives are the smartmontools, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/.

These are comprised of two main tools, smartctl and smartd.  smartctl is used to access and set S.M.A.R.T. info on the drives.  The smartd tools is a daemon that run to continuely monitor the status of your drive and report/email that.

These tools can be used to monitor both IDE (PATA and SATA drives) and scsi drives.  In addition they have drivers to work with some raid controllers;


    3ware RAID controllers are supported on Linux since smartmontools release 5.1-18. Support for char devices /dev/tw* was added in release 5.33.

    3ware support on FreeBSD is available since release 5.33, multiple controller and char device support was added in release 5.36.

    3ware 9000 support for Windows was added 2006-09-27, the corresponding 3ware driver 9.4.0 was released 2006-11-01.

    HighPoint RocketRAID support for Linux was added 2006-08-25.

    CCISS (Compaq Smart Array Controller) support for Linux was added 2006-10-09.

The recent additions are included in smartmontools release 5.37.


These tools run a several platforms... (most that I can think of) LInux, Windows, NetBSD, Solaris, and others.