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smartmontools Home Page

Welcome! This is the home page for the smartmontools package.

NEWS: Please report problems (or success!) with the new release to the smartmontools-support mailing list.

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.  In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure.

Smartmontools is originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package, and includes support for ATA/ATAPI-3 to -7 disks and SCSI disk and tape devices. It should run on any modern Darwin (Mac OSX), Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation or Windows system. Alternatively, it can also be run from one of the bootable CDs or floppies containing smartmontools.

For printing convenience, everything except for the example output is on a single page.



How to download and install smartmontools

There are different ways to get and install smartmontools.  You can use any of the procedures below (the fourth is for Debian Linux only).  Just after "Method 6" below are some instructions for trying out smartmontools once you have completed the installation. The INSTALL file contains additional information.

First Method (Redhat/Fedora Linux) - Install from the RPM file Second Method (Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Cygwin) - Install from the source tarball Third Method (Darwin/FreeBSD/Linux/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris/Cygwin) - Install from the CVS repository Fourth Method (Debian Linux) - Install the Debian package Fifth Method (Windows with Cygwin installed) - Install the Cygwin package Sixth Method (Windows) - Install the Windows package After installing it using Method 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 above, you can read the man pages, and try out the commands:
man smartd.conf
man smartctl
man smartd
/usr/sbin/smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/hda (only root can do this)
/usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda (only root can do this)

Note that the default location for the manual pages are /usr/share/man/man5 and /usr/share/man/man8.  If "man" doesn't find them, then you may need to add /usr/share/man to your MANPATH environment variable.

The Windows package (see Method 6 above) provides preformatted man pages in *.html and *.txt format.


Serious Problem Reports

If a serious problem gets reported to us, it gets added to the WARNINGS file in smartmontools. So far there are only a few problem systems listed.


Frequently Asked Questions

If your question is not here, please email me.


SCSI disks and tapes (TapeAlert)

Smartmontools for SCSI disks and tapes (including medium changers) is discussed on a separate page.


FireWire, USB, and SATA disks/systems

As for USB and FireWire (ieee1394) disks and tape drives, the news is not good. They appear to Linux as SCSI devices but their implementations do not usually support those SCSI commands needed by smartmontools. The ieee1394 consortium recently certified the first external enclosure (containing a ATA disk and a protocol bridge) as being compliant to the relevant standards. Such devices have already been on the market for about 3 years and they tend to only support the bare minimum of commands needed for device operation (i.e. SMART support is an unsupported extra).

Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, if you use the standard IDE drivers in drivers/ide. If you use the new libata drivers, it won't work correctly because libata doesn't yet support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. Jeff Garzik, the libata developer, says that this support will be added to libata in the future. When this happens, we'll add support to smartmontools for a new SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to force an SATA disk to run using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you must use the BIOS to select "legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE driver doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the controller doesn't have a legacy interface, then only libata can be used. Unless the hard disk controller on the system motherboard is Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not work

Note: an unofficial patch to libata that allows smartmontools to be used with the standard '-d ata' device type was posted to the linux kernel mailing list at the end of August 2004. The patch is included in the libata-dev patchset that can be applied to a recent Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9). With a SATA disk driven by a libata driver, smartmontools can now be used by specifying both the device type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to this disk, for example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still under development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is idle before trying smartmontools.


How does smartmontools differ from smartsuite?

The smartsuite code was originally developed as a Senior Thesis by Michael Cornwell at the Concurrent Systems Laboratory (now part of the Storage Systems Research Center), Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz. You can find some information about the original smartsuite project here: Press Release 1, Press Release 2, Press Release 3.

According to SSRC smartsuite is no longer maintained; the last release was in 2001.

Smartmontools was derived directly from smartsuite.  It differs from smartsuite in that it supports the ATA/ATAPI-5 standard.  So for example smartctl from smartsuite has no facility for printing the SMART self-test logs, and doesn't print timestamp information in the most usable way.  The smartctl utility in smartmontools has added functionality for this (-q, -l selftest,-S, -T, -v and -m options), updated documentation, and also fixes small technical bugs in smartsuite. [One example: smartsuite does not actually use the ATA SMART RETURN STATUS command to find out the health status of a disk. It instead tries to infer this from the SMART Attribute values.]  See the CHANGELOG file in CVS for a summary of what's been done.  The smartd utility differs from the smartsuite smartd in major ways.  First, it prints somewhat more informative error messages to the syslog.   Second, on startup it looks for a configuration file /etc/smartd.conf, and if smartd finds this file, it monitors the list of devices therein, rather than querying all IDE and SCSI devices on your system.  (If the configuration file does not exist, then it does query all IDE and SCSI devices.)  Also, it's a well-behaved daemon and doesn't leave open file descriptors and other detrius behind.  In addition, the smartmontools version of smartd can be instructed (via Directives in the configuration file) to monitor for changes in a number of different disk properties: the SMART status, failure or prefailure attributes going below threshold, new errors appearing in the ATA Error Log or the SMART Self-Test Log, and so on. smartd can also send an email warning or run a user-specified executable if it detects a problem with the disk.

The other principle difference is that smartmontools is an OpenSource development project, meaning that we keep the files in CVS, and that other developers who wish to contribute can commit changes to the archive. If you would like to contribute, please write to to smartmontools-support.

But the bottom line is that the code in smartmontools is derived directly from smartsuite and is similar.  The smartsuite package can be found here.


Useful references on SMART and the ATA/ATAPI standards

If you are having trouble understanding the output of smartctl or smartd, please first read the manual pages installed on your system:

man 8 smartctl
man 8 smartd
man 5 smartd.conf

Here are on-line versions of the smartmontools man pages:
smartctl manual page
smartd manual page
smartd.conf manual page
Note that these are the manual pages for the current version of smartmontools in the developers CVS repository; they might not correspond to the (possibly older) version of smartmontools installed on your system. So the manual pages installed on your system should be regarded as definitive for your installation.

If you'd like to know more about SMART, then the following references may be helpful:


Example output from smartmontools smartctl utility:
Maintained by: Bruce Allen
Copyright (C) 2002-5 Bruce Allen
Last updated: $Date: 2006/09/01 17:12:49 $
CVS tag: $Id: index.html,v 1.207 2006/09/01 17:12:49 guidog Exp $
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