GSmartControl is a simple and useful application designed to be a graphical user interface for smartctl 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.

What's New in This Release:
· Implemented support for Adaptec RAID 5805 controller and possibly other Adaptec models as well (Linux).
· Implemented support for Areca RAID controller detection under Linux (untested).
· Implemented support for 3ware 3w-sas-supported (twl) RAID controller detection under Linux (untested).
· Implemented support for systems with several different 3ware controllers (twa/twe/twl).
· Fixed invalid parsing of tw_cli output which caused non-detection of drives and controllers with controller or port numbers greater than 9 if tw_cli was found (3ware linux, windows).
· The duplicate drives are no longer shown for some Intel matrix controllers under Windows; Intel RAID controllers are fully supported under Windows now.
· Added options to show device name and serial number under drive icons.
· Updated SMART attribute definitions and added warnings for SSD lifetime attributes.
· gsmartcontrol-root has a new argument "--desktop=..." which replaces the old positional argument; compatibility with the old invocati...