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I see there is a virtual file /proc/ide/hda/smart_values and I imagine it contains the smart data that smartmontools reads with the smartctl command.

Can I read that data with my own eyes? I see a bunch of numbers in the file and would like to determine the health of the drive without downloading and installing smartmontools.

Thanks!

Jason
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    Is installing Smartmontools really that much of a hardship? Isn't there a package for your distribution? – Tom O'Connor Aug 05 '13 at 18:41
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    Of course you can. All you need to do is to either read the SMART specs or the smartmontoools source code and learn how to interpret the data you see. Have fun for the next few weeks. – Sven Aug 05 '13 at 18:54

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Professionals don't reinvent the wheel -- people use smartmontools because that software is well-written, handles a large number of drive families, and Just Works.
Save yourself a lot of pain ad suffering and just install the standard tools.

If you want to implement this as a learning experience (i.e. not in a production environment where you're relying on it to tell you if you're about to lose a disk) then you can certainly do as SvW suggests and write your own SMART tools.
This is certainly not something I would want to do. Disks are terrible creatures and down that road lies only madness.

Community
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voretaq7
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  • What if the machine is remote, the disk is suspected broken, but you can't install smartmontools because the kernel remounted read-only due to errors? True story :) – Thomas Nov 04 '21 at 12:18
  • But if you want to automate retrieval and processing of SMART data, using smartctl requires you to parse text which could be problematic. Is there some kind of API so I can easily fetch the data without needing to parse anything? – Michael Jul 24 '23 at 14:11