Smart Daemon

SMART

If you want to read out the smart status of your hard disk you can use smartmontools.

>apt-get install smartmontools

Now you have 2 utility program's (smartctl and smartd). With smartctl you can read out your hard disks. To see more info on you're drive type:

>smartctl -i /dev/hda

Or to see all the smart read out

>smartctl -a /dev/hda

This will give you all info of your hard disk. For sata disk you will have to give the -d option

>smartctl -d ata -a /dev/hda

Fore more options on smartctl use -h

Now we can configure the smart daemon in /etc/smartd.conf. This daemon will monitor your hard disks. This config file gives you a good explination of the different options you can use

I use the following options

/dev/sda -d ata -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03)
/dev/sda -d ata -H -m admin@linuz.nl

Format

To see you're current disk partitioning

darktower:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120060444672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14596 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1       14596   117242338+  83  Linux

To see more info on you're drive you can use smartctl This is a command provided by the smartmontools package.

smartctl -i /dev/hda

HDPARM

Also hdparm can be used to get or set the drive parameters.

darktower:~# hdparm -d /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
using_dma    =  1 (on)

To set udma use -d0 (off) or -d1 (on). Fore more options on smartctl use -h

Partioning and format

Now to partition the disk

cfdisk /dev/hda

Choose you're partioning type en size

Now that we have 1 or more partitions, we have to format it with a filesystem. The most commonly used filesystem is ext3 (in unix that is)

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1