SMARTmontools controls and monitors storage devices using the
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology System (S.M.A.R.T.)
built into ATA, SATA and SCSI Hard Drives. This is used to check the
hard drive reliability and to predict drive failures. The suite
contains two utilities. The first, smartctl, is a command line utility
designed to perform simple S.M.A.R.T. tasks. The second, smartd, is a
daemon that periodically monitors the smart status and reports errors
to syslog. The package is compatible with the ATA/ATAPI-3 to -7
specification. The package is intended to incorporate as much "vendor
specific" and "reserved" information as possible about disk drives. The
commands man smartctl and man smartd will provide more information.