HARD DISK MONITORING

Hard Disk Sentinel Linux Edition (FREE)

By using Hard Disk Sentinel Linux console edition, it is possible to examine the temperature and health information (and more) of IDE, S-ATA (SATA II also), SCSI and USB hard disks connected to motherboard or external controller cards. The user must be root to use this software or start it with sudo.

List of features

• display hard disk / solid state disk information on the terminal
• create comprehensive report about the disk system, including both hard disk and SSD specific features (for example, media rotation rate, TRIM command, etc.)
• display and manage acoustic setting of hard disks (on supported USB disks also)
• offers outputs for both users and scripts/other applications to process

The following information are displayed:

• detected hard disk number and device name (for example /dev/sda)
• size, model ID, serial number, revision and interface of all detected hard disks
• temperature, health and performance values
• power on time (days, hour, minutes - if supported)
  Note: this is for informational purposes only, the value displayed under Windows (after some minutes of testing) may be more accurate
• acoustic management settings (if supported and -aam or -setaam option is used

Command line switches

The switches are NOT case sensitive. Upper and lower case can be used to specify them.

• -h - displays help and usage information
• -r [report file] - automatically save report to filename (default: report.txt)
• -dump - dump report to stdout (can be used with -xml to dump XML output instead of text)
• -xml - create and save XML report instead of TXT
• -solid - solid output (drive, tempC, health%, power on hours, model, S/N, size)
• -verbose - detailed detection information and save temporary files (only for debug purposes)
• -aam - display acoustic management settings (current and recommended level)
• -setaam drive_num|ALL level(hex)80-FE|QUIET|LOUD - set acoustic level on drive 0..n (or all)
  80 or QUIET is the lowest (most silent) setting, FE or LOUD is the highest (fastest) setting
  For example: hdsentinel -setaam 0 loud - Configures drive 0 to fastest (loud) setting. Same as hdsentinel -setaam 0 FE

Please send saved XML or TXT reports, questions or ideas to info@hdsentinel.com to help improving this tool.

License

Hard Disk Sentinel Linux edition is FREE. You can freely distribute and use it to analyse hard disk status. However, if you like this tool and would like to keep it updated, please support further development by registering the Windows version of the software.

Usage of Hard Disk Sentinel Linux version

After downloading the file below, please follow these steps to use it:

• double click to open and decompress it to any folder
• open a terminal window and navigate to the folder
• change file permissions to make it executable by using chmod 755 HDSentinel
• launch it by entering sudo ./HDSentinel [options]
  sudo is not required if you logged in as "root".

Examples

Optimize complete system for silence: hdsentinel -setaam all quiet

Optimize complete system for high performance (but louder disk access): hdsentinel -setaam all loud

Select a balanced level between silence and performance on drive 0: hdsentinel -setaam 0 C0
Note: some disks do not support balanced settings and they may select the most silent (80) or high performance (FE) setting instead.
Please start hsentinel without parameters to see drive assignments (eg. /dev/sda) to drive indexes.

Due to the high amount of requests, it is possible to create minimal output which can be easily parsed and processed for further use. Some examples are:

List disk drives, temperature (in Celsius), health %, power on hours, disk model, disk serial, size:
hdsentinel -solid. Sample results:

  /dev/sda 42   3  4830 WDC_WD800JD-8LSA0   WD-WMAM9F937837   76324
  /dev/sdb 30 100  6128 ST3250624A          5ND3J94R         238472
  /dev/sdc 46 100 10982 WDC_WD2500JS-00MHB0 WD-WCANK8705209  238475
  /dev/sdd  ?   ?     ? GENERIC_CF_READER   9999                  0
  /dev/sde  ?   ?     ? GENERIC_SD_READER   9999               1963

List only temperature, drive, size:
hdsentinel -solid | awk '{print $2, $1, $7}'

  42 /dev/sda 76324 
  30 /dev/sdb 238472
  46 /dev/sdc 238475
  ? /dev/sdd 0      
  ? /dev/sde 1963   

List only temperature, drive, model ID, highest temperature on top, drives without temperature information (for example card readers) removed:
hdsentinel -solid | awk '{print $2, $1, $5}' | grep -v "^?" | sort -nr

  46 /dev/sdc WDC_WD2500JS-00MHB0
  42 /dev/sda WDC_WD800JD-8LSA0  
  30 /dev/sdb ST3250624A         

List only health, temperature, drive, lowest health on top, drives without temperature information (for example card readers) removed:
hdsentinel -solid | awk '{print $3, $2, $1}' | grep -v "^?" | sort -n

  3 42 /dev/sda  
  100 30 /dev/sdb
  100 46 /dev/sdc

Note that the spaces in hard disk model ID and serial number are replaced with underscore (_).

If you have any ideas, thoughts about the automatic processing of output or if you have complete script(s) you want to share with other users, please send a mail and it will be published on this page with the name and credits of the sender of the script.

Hard Disk Sentinel 32-bit Linux console version - executable, zip-compressed

Hard Disk Sentinel 64-bit Linux console version - executable, zip-compressed

Hard Disk Sentinel Linux console version for Raspberry PI (ARM CPU) - executable, gzip-compressed

Compatibility

Kernel support is required to detect and display information about SATA hard disks. This version was successfully tested under the following systems:

• CentOS 5, 6
• Fedora 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and newer
• Ubuntu 8.04 server kernel 2.6.24-16-server, 9.04
• Kubuntu 8.04
• Xubuntu 8.04
• Slackware 11.0
• UHU Linux 2.1
• SuSe 10.2, SuSe 10.3 (SuSe 10.0 - NOT working, reports wanted)
• Debian Lenny 5.0
• Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.1 Squeez
• Raspberry PI (ARM CPU)

Successfully tested with Adaptec SCSI controllers and SCSI hard disks, and with external enclosures built with different USB-ATA bridge in chips USB Hard disks, hard disk enclosures.

Updates

0.08

0.03 - Download this version

0.02 - Download this version

0.01 - Download this version