Ubuntu 12.04 Disk Utility S.M.A.R.T

I was surprised to be greeted by an error dialogue notifying me of a potential issue with one of the HDD but also very grateful.

Clicking on the Examine button opened up the Disk Utility program which is part of Ubuntu 12.04. The only fault I can find with this screen is the lack of indication of which drive has been picked up having a fault. The image above shows the system has 4 drives and the only way to tell which one has failed is by clicking on each to open the drive details.

Clicking on the SMART Data button under the SMART Status brings up another window of the available stats and sensors in the drive. This is where Microsoft Windows falls down on because you’d always download a third party tool in order to accessing this type of information.

All in all I am very happy with S.M.A.R.T technology where as before I felt it was rudimentary it has definitely saved my bacon. What’s more impressive is the tools built into Ubuntu to monitor and diagnose the issue.

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Hardware, Linux and tagged Disk Utility, HDD, Microsoft, microsoft windows, S.M.A.R.T., Ubuntu, windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP. Bookmark the permalink.

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