I'm using a tool called HDSentinel for all Linux machines: http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_linux.php http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_l

I'm using a tool called HDSentinel for all Linux machines: http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_linux.php http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_linux.php - it's a small static binary (closed through) that reads the SMART values and calculates a health formula out of it: http://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/52_cond.html http://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/52_cond.html I don't have detailed statistics but it's quite reliable in predicting disk health. All drives I had to change because even ZFS couldn't cope with read errors anymore had a health below 10%. I'm using this for Nagios checks instead of other SMART checks as it's more reliable and the health reporting is all you need to inspect the drive further. Never got reliable performance values out of the drives we use through. But that's a SMART problem for certain vendors. I have nothing to do with them, I just think it's a great tool that allows watching the values named in the article quite elegant.