SMART is a monitoring system, included in most modern hard disks, that attempts to diagnose disk health and predict impending drive failure. The smartctl/smartd utility of smartmontools is the standard for Linux/Unix and versions of it are available for Windows as well. DiskCheckup also seems to be a good utility for Windows. Many modern controller and RAID cards will refuse to acknowledge a disk if it reports SMART Failed status.
Remember that the RAW value reported by most SMART utilities is distinct from the normalized value reported by some tools. In general a high RAW value and a low normalized value indicate a problem.
The SATA page has some additional info. NTFS.com has a list of SMART attributes and their definitions.
Fast SMART Disk Checkup
The fastest synopsis of a disk’s status is probably smartctl -Hc /dev/sd?:
$ smartctl -Hc /dev/sda
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.13.0-24-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 0) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x7f) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Abort Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 48) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x0021) SCT Status supported.
SCT Data Table supported.
If you want a one-line disk diagnosis, you can add grep:
$ smartctl -Hc /dev/sda | grep "^SMART overall" SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
Keep a mind that once your SMART disk diagnosis reports FAILED status here, the smartctl command itself may well fail also.
