Smartmontools Recommended Links

Table of Contents

Smartmontools Recommended Links

Graphical And Web User Interfaces For `smartctl`

GSmartControl (C++, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, Windows)
HDD Guardian (VB.NET, Windows, retired). Due to CodePlex shutdown, see GitHub for source code, and Softpedia or SnapFiles for binaries.
DriveDx (OS X, Proprietary Software)
SMART Utility (OS X, Proprietary Software)
scrutiny WebUI for smartd S.M.A.R.T monitoring

Monitoring Tools Working With Smartmontools

Mirrors And Forks Of Smartmontools

Official GitHub mirror of smartmontools SVN - Feel free to fork, submit PR-s and issues.
Independent GitHub mirror of smartmontools SVN trunk - PR-s and issues placed here will possibly be ignored.
libsmartctl - Provides smartctl functionality as a static library.
Smartmontools with security - a fork of smartmontools 6.2 which adds ATA Security commands to smartctl.

Other Projects Using Smartmontools

Linux Desktop HDD/SSD Reliability Test - Enterprise HDD/SSD Reliability Test - a large collection of smartctl outputs collected by Linux users at linux-hardware.org.
BSD HDD/SSD Reliability Test - a large collection of smartctl outputs collected by BSD users at bsd-hardware.info.
Pure Go SMART library (Go, GPLv3) - includes mkdrivedb tool to download smartmontools drivedb.h file and convert it to YAML.
pySMART - a simple Python wrapper for the smartctl component of smartmontools.
Smartmontools for Windows Package (Source Code) - alternative smartmontools installation package for Windows.
Supermicro SuperDoctor

CrystalDiskInfo (C++, MIT, Windows)
libatasmart, skdump, sktest (C, LGPLv2.1, Linux)
hdck (C, GPLv3, Linux)
hdparm (C, BSD, Linux)
MBRFilter (C, GPLv2, Windows) - Disk filter driver that prevents writing to sector 0
Naraeon NVMe Tools (Delphi, GPLv3, Windows)
Naraeon SSD Tools (Delphi, MIT, Windows)
nvme-cli (C, GPLv2, Linux/FreeBSD)
openSeaChest (Seagate) (C, MPLv2, Cross platform)
trimcheck (D, MPLv2, Windows)
OS X SAT SMART Driver (C++, APSL, Mac OS) - kernel driver for providing access to external (USB or FireWire) drive SMART data

HDD/SSD References

Studies / Background Info

Hard Drive Data and Stats, Brian Beach, Andy Klein in Backblaze Blog, since November 2013.
Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives, Carlo Meijer, Bernard van Gastel, November 2018 (see also Schneier on Security).
The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates, Andy Klein in Backblaze Blog, May 2018.
What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives, Andy Klein in Backblaze Blog, October 2016.
got HW crypto? On the (in)security of a Self-Encrypting Drive series, Gunnar Alendal, Christian Kison, modg, September 2015.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: 22TB, 200TB, 300TB, 500TB, 600TB, 1PB, 1.5PB, 2PB, They’re all dead, Geoff Gasior in The Tech Report, August 2013 - March 2015.
SSD Benchmarking at CERN (Results), Liviu Vâlsan in HEPiX Fall 2014 Workshop, October 2014.
Anatomy of a Solid-state Drive, Michael Cornwell (Pure Storage) in ACM Queue vol 10, no 10, October 2012.
Vendor disk failure rates: Myth or metric?, Mary Brandel in Computerworld, April 2008.
Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics, Weihang Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, Arkady Kanevsky in 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ‘08), pg 111-125, February 2008.
Hard Disk Drives: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Jon Elerath (Network Appliance) in ACM Queue vol 5, no 6, pg 28-37, September 2007.
Disk Failures in the Real World: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?, Bianca Schroeder, Garth A. Gibson (Carnegie Mellon University) in 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ‘07), pg 1-16, February 2007.
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso (Google Inc.) in 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ‘07), pg 17-28, February 2007.
Specifying Reliability in the Disk Drive Industry: No More MTBF’s, Jon G. Elerath (IBM Storage Systems Division) in Proceedings of the IEEE 2000 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, pg 194, January 2000.

Useful References On SMART

Wikipedia articles about SMART:

English, Deutsch, Español, Français,
Italiano, Japanese, Nederlands, Polski,
Português, Russian, Slovenčina, Svenska

Zbigniew Chlondowski’s SMART Information Site (no longer maintained)

ATA/ATAPI References

The homepage of the T13 project.
Access to documents requires a T13 account.

SCSI References

The homepage of the T10 project.
Public documents are available under the conditions of the T10 public-access model.

NVMe References

See NVMe page on Smartmontools website.

The Original SMART Specification

The original SMART specification is SFF-8035i from the Small Form Factors (SFF) Committee.
Here is the SFF “link” (they have “expired” the document).

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