Sometimes it is useful to get some more information about your hard drive than just the size remaining. For this purpose there is a Linux package called smartmontools available, which can be easily installed.

$ sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Once available you can inspect different quantities and qualities of your drive by issuing smartctl commands. A good article is available over at TechRepublic.com written by Vincent Danen

The tools will be installed to /usr/sbin/smartctl. In case you are on a machine that does not have sbin in it’s path (I was working on a bananapi, which does not) you will have to precede the commands with the full path.

Some commands and their output are given below.

Get the basic information from your drive

$ sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl 6.4 2014-10-07 r4002 [armv7l-linux-3.4.112-bananian] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Red (AF)
Device Model:     WDC WD20EFRX-68EUZN0
Serial Number:    WD-WCC4M0AX088S
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2b66bd176
Firmware Version: 82.00A82
User Capacity:    2.000.398.934.016 bytes [2,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5400 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Sun Apr 16 17:57:13 2017 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Starting a short test

$ sudo smartctl --test=short /dev/sda

Viewing the test results

The test results will be at the end of the ouptut provided by smartctl -a. Test information starts with a hash.

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      8034         -

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
 SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
    1        0        0  Not_testing
    2        0        0  Not_testing
    3        0        0  Not_testing
    4        0        0  Not_testing
    5        0        0  Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
  After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.