So lots of people use computers, and lots of people have harddrives.

At my work I deal with lots and lots of computers and lots and lots of drives. So during a week I see plenty of failing drives, just because of the statistics.

So now-a-days I run a “smart test” on the drive to see how it is. Unfortunately most drive testers and smart tests are crap. So I made my own and I want to share it with you….

It runs in Linux of course, and all it needs is a program called smartctl. (If you don’t have it and you are running Ubuntu, just run “apt-get install smartmontools” )

Here is how you can get it and run it:

$ wget a.xkyle.com/smarttest $ bash smarttest

Thats it! Just give it about 2 minutes to run. Here is an example output:

Hours: 27519 SMART Errors: 0 Reallocated / Pending: 2 / 0 Read Speed: 41 MB/s

WARNING: This drive has over 26,280 (3 years) hours on it and should not be used as a Primary WARNING: This drive has some reallocated sectors, this shouldn’t be used as a primary and requires judgment if it is to be used for a secondary

Its pretty self explainitory if you know about drives. If you want to know more about smart paramaters, check out the wikipedia article.