[latitude]

Might be a good time to plug my little baby - https://diskovery.io

If you want to have a quick, but in-depth look at your drives, it'll give you lots of data, including the SMART table interpreted in a vendor-specific way. It also understands some RAID setups, and more support for this is upcoming. Windows only, at the moment.

To explain a bit of a context - SMART data comprises a set of attributes and each attribute has a value, a threshold and a raw value. Values are opaque 8-bit somethings that are only meant to be compared to thresholds. When they fall under then, then it may indicate a problem. They aren't really interesting. What's interesting is the "raw" values, but as the name implies, they are vendor-specific and require decoding. Some vendors publish the specs, but most don't. Specs that are published are often incomplete or plain wrong. So there's a LOT of reverse engineering and guesswork involved, which makes writing a SMART tool both frustrating and interesting at the same time. But if you need just the "dying / healthy" indicator, it's a very easy thing to extract from a drive.

[djsumdog]

Has anyone ported your work to Linux or MacOS? I guess not since iIt looks like it would be very OS specific. It looks like an incredible tool.

[latitude]

It is indeed pretty OS specific.

Not the SMART part, but how you talk to the drives and controllers and how storage is generally sliced into partitions, volumes, etc. Windows has a fairly comprehensive version of Software RAID, but in true Microsoft fashion they do things ass-backwards in more than one place. For example, striped volumes (RAID 0) will use only a part of a partition for each stripe, but to learn that you'd have to talk to Virtual Disk Service rather than regular Disk/Volume management API. This is, basically, as unportable as it gets.