Webmasters monitor the current status and health of hard drives via the SMART attributes. Install smartctl on Linux is pretty similar for various distributions.

As a part of our Server Management Services, we help our Customers with software installations regularly.

Let us today discuss the steps to install smartctl on Linux.

Installation of SmartCTL on CentOS 7

We can install Smartctl easily with the following command:

# yum install smartmontools

Once the installation is complete, enable it to starts when the server reboots with the command below:

# systemctl enable smartd

Now, we can start the service  and check its status with the commands given below:

# systemctl start smartd
# systemctl status smartd

Installation of SmartCTL on Ubuntu

The installation of smartctl on Ubuntu similar to that on CentOS. We could install it on Ubuntu with the command below:

# apt-get install smartmontools

The steps to enable/start smartctl and the user commands on Ubuntu are the same as they are on CentOS.

Usage of smartctl

Smartctl can perform various hard drive tests. We can analyze a faulty drive or perform an ATA/SCSI test based on our HDD type.

The following command helps us to check if smartctl is enabled.

# smartctl -i /dev/vda

Replace “/dev/vda” with the correct disk label which can be obtained from the output of df -h command. A sample output of the above command will look like this.

smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-linux-3.10.0-1127.19.1.el7.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: QEMU
Product: Vz HARDDISK0
Revision: 2.5+
Compliance: SPC-3
User Capacity: 42,949,672,960 bytes [42.9 GB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
LU is thin provisioned, LBPRZ=0
Serial number: e603b97ac34343e582bb
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Tue Oct 6 15:37:02 2020 EEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

The last two lines of this output highlighted in the image below indicates that smartctl is enabled for the drive.

If the output indicates that SMART support is available, but not enabled, we can run this command to enable it.

# smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/vda

Disable smartctl

To disable SMART capabilities on the hard drive, we can use this:

# smartctl -s off /dev/vda

Check Drive Health

To display the overall health of the hard drive, we can use this one:

# smartctl -H /dev/vda

Our output will look like this:

smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-linux-3.10.0-1127.19.1.el7.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Verify Test Mode

To make sure that drive is capable of running tests on its own, we can use this one:

# smartctl -H /dev/vda

Run Long/Short Test

When we want to run a short or long test on the HDD, we can use these two commands:

# smartctl –test=short /dev/vda
# smartctl –test=long /dev/vda

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Conclusion

In short, the SMART test helps us to detect any potential problems with the hardware. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers install smartctl on Centos and Ubuntu distros.