To check the health of a hard drive on Linux, which command is used?

The command used to check the health of a hard drive on Linux is sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdX. This command interacts with the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) system, which is built into most modern hard drives. By using the -H option, the command retrieves the overall health status of the specified drive, providing insights into issues such as potential failures or performance degradation.

In contrast, other commands listed have different purposes. For instance, sudo lsblk is used to list all block devices and their relationships, but it does not provide any health information about the drives. The command sudo fdisk -l displays partition tables and disk space usage information, but again, it doesn't check the health of the drive itself. Finally, the command sudo lshw gives a comprehensive report of the hardware on the system, which can include drive specifications but does not specifically assess their health status.