The GSmartControl application was designed to be a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.
What is SMART?
Short answer: SMART is a technology which provides hard disk drives with methods to predict certain kinds of failures with certain chance of success.
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART, is a monitoring system for hard drives to detect and report various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. It is implemented inside the drives SMART provides several ways of monitoring hard drive health. It may provide information about general health, various drive attributes (for example, number of unreadable sectors), error logs, and so on. It may also provide ways to instruct the drive to run various self-tests, which may report valuable information. It may even automatically scan the disk surface in when the drive is idle, and repair the defects, reallocating the data to more safe areas.
While having SMART sounds really good, there are some nuances to consider. One of the common pitfalls is that it may create a false sense of security. That is, a perfectly good SMART data is NOT an indication that the drive won't fail the next minute. The reverse is also true - some drives may function perfectly even with not-so-good-looking SMART data. However, as studies indicate, given a large population of drives, some SMART attributes may reliably predict drive failures within up to two months.
Another common mistake is to assume that the attribute values are the real physical values, as experienced by the drive. As manufacturers do not necessarily agree on precise attribute definitions and measurement units, the exact meaning of the attributes may vary greatly across different drive models.
At present SMART is implemented individually by manufacturers, and while some aspects are standardized for compatibility, others are not. In fact, most manufacturers refer the users to their own health monitoring utilities, and advice against taking SMART data seriously. Nevertheless, SMART may prove an effective measure against data loss.
Yet another issue is that quite often the drives have bugs which prevent correct SMART usage. This is usually due to buggy firmware, or the manufacturer ignoring the standard. Luckily, smartmontools usually detects these bugs and works around them.

· automatically reports and highlights any anomalies;
· allows enabling/disabling SMART;
· allows enabling/disabling Automatic Offline Data Collection - a short self-check that the drive will perform automatically every four hours with no impact on performance;
· supports configuration of global and per-drive options for smartctl;
· performs SMART self-tests;
· displays drive identity information, capabilities, attributes, and self-test/error logs;
· can read in smartctl output from a saved file, interpreting it as a read-only virtual device;
· works on most smartctl-supported operating systems;
· has extensive help information.

Requirements:
· You will need GTK+ for Windows Runtime package to use it under Windows. You should have at least version 2.14.4-2008-11-11 of gtk2-runtime

What's New in This Release:
· Support detecting drives behind 3ware controllers (Linux, Windows), including tw_cli/cx/px mode in Windows. Having tw_cli is recommended but not required.
· Added support for specifying -d option and extra parameters via command line, "Add Device" and "Preferences" dialogs. This change effectively adds full support for multiple drives behind a single device name.
· Beesu and su-to-root are supported by gsmartcontrol-root script now.
· Completely revamped the attribute database and its handling, should be a lot more usable and forward-compatible now; SSD attributes are also included.
· In-program help has been expanded considerably.
· General improvements to user interface have been implemented (better GNOME HIG compliance, better tooltips, dialogs, etc...).
· Added ability to show smartctl output for devices whose info could not be parsed fully.
· Attributes in "brief" format are supported now.
· The parser has been updated to reflect the recent changes in smartctl.
· Quit and rescan...