How to check hard drive health on FreeBSD with smartctl CLI

To check the health of a hard drive on a FreeBSD system using the smartctl command line tool, you can use the smartctl command with the -H option.

To check the health of a hard drive, open a terminal window and run the following command:

smartctl -H /dev/ada0

Replace /dev/ada0 with the name of your hard drive. You can use the smartctl command with the -a option to list the available hard drives on your system.

The smartctl command will display information about the hard drive, including the SMART status and any diagnostic messages.

For example, the output might look something like this:

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

In this example, the SMART overall-health self-assessment test result is PASSED, indicating that the hard drive is in good health.

If the SMART overall-health self-assessment test result is FAILED, it may indicate that the hard drive is experiencing problems and may need to be replaced.

It's worth noting that the smartctl command requires the smartmontools package to be installed on the system. You can install this package using the pkg command:

pkg install smartmontools

You can also use the smartctl command with the -A option to display more detailed information about the hard drive, including the SMART attributes and their values. This can be useful for diagnosing specific problems with the hard drive.

For example, to display the SMART attributes and their values for a hard drive, you can use the following command:

smartctl -A /dev/ada0