GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Last article we introduced the SMART capabilities of hard drives (who knew your drives were SMART?). In this article smartmontools, an application for examining the SMART attributes and trigger self tests, is examined.

GSmartControl is a really useful Linux app to check the health of your hard disk drive. GSmartControl is basically a graphical user interface for smartctl, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. Only ATA drives including both PATA and SATA are supported for now.

Vincent Danen has some tips for using the smartmontools package to obtain important information about the health of your hard drives that could provide early warning signs of problems.

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.

Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology.

Modern hard drives can tell you quite a bit about how they’re doing and show you some statistics about themselves. It won’t necessarily give you a realistic guess of when your drive is going to die, but it can help to keep tabs on things nevertheless.

Installing Ubuntu 11.04 or any other distribution on an external hard drive connected to a computer via USB is about the same as installing it on an internal hard disk. The key is to remember, after partitioning the disk, to install GRUB, the boot loader, in the MBR of the external disk, rather than in the MBR of the internal disk.

Almost every aspect of our daily and business lives are stored on hard disks. But the hard disk is a mechanical device with moving parts. You know what that means. Eventually they will fail.