[conspire] Looking for some OSS tools...

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 02:48:57PM -0700:
> Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):
> 
> > If the drives have SMART support, you can use
> > smartmontools.  More info in "Monitoring Hard Disks
> > with SMART"
> > 
> > http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983
> 
> Strong recommendation.  Edward, the advantage of querying the drive with
> smartmontools is that all relatively recent hard drives are busy _all
> the time_ reporting SMART-protocol information on the state of their
> health.  The smartmontools listen in on, and summarise, that
> information.

You can also kick off what sounds like a strenuous
self-test using smartctl, which is a command-line
utility included with the package.  I don't know
which of the vendor-specific tools do a test that
smartctl doesn't, or if they're all just wrappers
around the same SMART commands that smartctl can do.

If I was planning on using a hard drive I wasn't
sure about, I'd run a bunch of tests with smartctl
overnight and look at the results before spending
any more time on the drive.

-- 
Don Marti
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org