layout: default title: Comprehensive Manual description: Deep dive into disk-health-cli mechanics and usage.

disk-health-cli Manual

Welcome to the definitive source of truth for disk-health-cli. This tool is engineered to quickly and effectively read hardware sensors to determine the genuine SMART health data of all local drives.

🛠️ Installation & Updates

The simplest way to use disk-health-cli is through the global one-line installer.

Fresh Install

This curl string safely fetches exactly one shell script and creates a /usr/local/bin linkage so you can call disk-health anywhere inside your system organically.

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blackstart-labs/disk-health-cli/main/install.sh | sudo bash

Self Updating

You do not need to repeat the install block above once deployed. Run the built-in update hook any time you want to fetch new features or logic improvements:

sudo disk-health --update

💡 Usage & Flags

Our goal isn't replacing smartmontools entirely but making the 99% usage—health verification—accessible at a glance.

# General Check
sudo disk-health

# Display Help
disk-health --help

# Ensure you are on the newest codebase
sudo disk-health --update

Output Breakdown

When running disk-health you will receive a block per connected drive. Here is how we generate each field:

Output Field	Context	Hardware Specifics
Model	Name of the hardware.	Parsed directly from SMART logic models.
Status	Overall generic `PASSED` / `FAILED` state.	Reads primary generic SMART assessment status.
Health	Expected percentage life remaining.	SATA uses `Available_Reservd_Space` or `Wear_Leveling_Count`. NVMe uses `percentage_used` inversion. HDDs fall back to reallocated sector tracking due to a lack of overall %.
Temperature	Operating heat in Celsius.	Fully supports raw Kelvin conversion from certain Debian `nvme-cli` builds to Celsius automatically.
Data Written	TBW (Terabytes Written).	Formatted nicely for NVMe and SSD drives by calculating Total LBAs written against 512 byte sectors.

⚙️ Architecture & Mechanics

disk-health-cli heavily prioritizes clean dependency handling and accurate logic fallbacks.

Dependency Auto-Resolution: When the script boots it validates if smartmontools, nvme-cli, gawk, and util-linux exist. If they do not, it leverages apt, dnf, or pacman automatically behind a sudo gate to install exactly what it needs for you. No manual downloading.
NVMe Fallback System: We default to nvme-cli for modern M.2 drives because S.M.A.R.T. logic isn't natively standard for them. If it fails, our awk handlers map seamlessly backward to secondary smartmontools definitions.
Regex Safe Patterning: By utilizing strict anchored awk regexs, we eliminate greedy multi-line captures that cause traditional bash scrapers to fail on arrays passing multiple temperature_sensor_# keys.

Disk Health CLI Manual