Alexandru's E-Desk

Recently I bought a 3ware sata raid card and installed 3 hard disks in it for a raid 5 array (maybe that’ll be another blog post), but I noticed that hddtemp didn’t read the temperature correctly anymore.
I figured this had something to do with hddtemp having to read through the raid card to get the temperature, so this is how I got temperature readings for my hard disks in the 3ware raid card.
This is done on ubuntu, but smartctl works on most linux distros so you can use the same instructions on other distros, apart from installing smartctl.
The smartctl script on ubuntu is found in the smartmontools package, so install it:

user@server:~$ sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Once that is installed, you can try the help command to make sure it got installed correctly:

user@server:~$ smartctl -h

If that works correctly, now we’re ready to read some temperatures.
Depending on the series of the 3ware card you have, the care is accessed through either /dev/twa or /dev/twe
Now, to read the temperature of the hdd in slot 1, the command is:

user@server:~$ sudo smartctl -H -d 3ware,0 /dev/twa0

Note that after the comma in 3ware,0 comes the number of the hdd slot you’re trying to read, going from 0 up. For example, for the hdd in the second slot, it would be 3ware,1
Also, I had my 3ware raid card in /dev/twa0, which might not be the case for your setup.
You might also want to look through the smartctl tool’s manual page because it’s quite a powerful tool for monitoring hdd performance and kicking off SMART tests on the hdds.