From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020913 Description of problem: At the moment we include smartmontools, but I find ide-smart more useful. I prefer that tool because it clearly marks the registers as prefailure or advisory. The is an information that is much more useful to a user and will allow techs getting a customer to use the tool to decide on the state of the disk. ide-smart(8) [...] The exact meaning of the attributes varies between manufacturers and even models, so it is impossible to decypher them (ranging through spin-up time to head flying height or throughput performance). At any rate, the value you should care upon is the last column, holding whether a test passed or failed. [...] Is there a reason why we chose smartmontools? Additional info: ide-smart is at http://lightside.eresmas.com/
I've been looking at this, and the one nice thing about the current smart monitor is that it can run in the background and reports failures to syslog over time... ide-smart seems to not have this currently.