This is a pretty cool tool I came across while doing research for another topic. Basically if you run Linux you can run this tool.

1.) sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda (or in my case it’s hda)

And that’s it. If it gives you an error, try running sudo smartctl by itself. If it says it requires tools to be installed, you can use apt-get install smartmontools.

This will give you all the details as reported by the SMART hardware system built into all newer drives. Total hours in use, power cycles, temperature, recovered errors, failures. Some of the data can be a little bit off (my initial reading of HD temperature was 705757226C) but overall it’s pretty neat.