Hard disk going-bad detection

[Matthew Hagerty]

mal content wrote:
> On 29/08/06, Matthew Hagerty <matthew at digitalstratum.com> wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I have a hard drive that every now and then makes a sound like the head
>> is moving from one extreme to the other, then parking.  It is hard to
>> explain, kind of a towk-kok-click with a metallic ring to it.  If you
>> have heard a drive do this before, you know the sound.  I heard a drive
>> do this to me a few months ago and it failed shortly thereafter.
>>
>> I have 3 drives in the system so it is very hard to know which drive it
>> is, so in an attempt to get a new drive before the one fails out right,
>> is there any way I can test the drives in place?  One drive is primarily
>> my system disk (20G), the second (120G) has /usr mounted on it, and the
>> third (120G) is mounted, rsync'd, umounted every night to make a backup
>> of the other two.  So, the backup drive I can test no problem, even
>> destructively if necessary.  However, the two that make up the active
>> system I would like to be able to test without disrupting normal
>> operation if possible?  But, I'll take the box offline for a bit if
>> necessary.  Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>
> Your setup is exactly identical to mine, even down to mount points and
> disk sizes.
>
> Try smartmontools, most drives support S.M.A.R.T so you should have
> no trouble:
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/smartmontools/
>
> It's useful for identifying drives that are about to die.
>
> You shouldn't need to take the machine offline.
>
> MC

Does SMART have to be enabled in the BIOS for smartmontools to work?  
I've always seen the SMART setting in the BIOS but it is always been 
defaulted to "disabled" on just about every motherboard I have ever 
worked with, and I never took the time to look up what it was.  I'll 
give smartd and smartmontools a try and see what they tell me.  Thanks.

Matthew