September 28, 2008

Hard Disk Sentinel

HDSentinel is an utility that interprets the SMART information of your hard disk drives. Their flagship product is an extensive GUI tool for Win32, but they also have a small command-line application for GNU/Linux.

It was recently uploaded to ArchLinux AUR and I gave it a whirl.

Its output for one of my disks claimed it to be close to failure:

HDD Device  2: /dev/sda
HDD Model ID : ST3160023A
HDD Serial No: 5JS2NX0R
HDD Revision : 3.06
HDD Size     : 152628 MB
Interface    : IDE/ATA
Temperature  : 42 °C
Health       : 13 %
Performance  : 100 %
Power on time: 658 days, 7 hours
Est. lifetime: 19 days

The theory behind HDSentinel seems sound, so I’m looking forward to see whether the prediction will hold.

September 28th 2008 Posted to Arch Linux, GNU/Linux, Hack, Tech

* Comments(1)

Comments

  1. dunkelstern
    October 6th, 2008 | 7:03 pm

    It seems that you have a Seagate disk, so beware, seagate disks return “errorneous data” (well they interpreted the S.M.A.R.T. specification differently) when it comes to disk health. Some tools like “SpeedFan” (Windows) have a built in workaround for seagate disks to display correct data. I don’t know if the tool displays correct data here.

    My laptop disk was down to 3% health before speedfan integrated the workaround. After the workaround the health increased to 86%.

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