Linux Administration Cookbook

Self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (SMART)

Firstly, it's a good idea to make sure that smartd is running on whichever system you want to query:

$ sudo systemctl enable smartd

smartd is the monitoring daemon for SMART; the daemon attempts to enable monitoring on compatibly ATA devices when it starts and, by default, polls the ATA devices every 30 minutes.

By default, errors detected by smartd as part of its periodic work are logged using the SYSLOG interface. It can also email out to an administrator if configured to do so.

Once enabled, disks can then be queried with the smartctl tool:

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

Note the use of sudo and the denoting of a disk device.

Sadly, because we're in a VirtualBox VM, this won't give ...