By using the Linux console edition of Hard Disk Sentinel, it is possible to examine the temperature and health information (and more) of IDE, S-ATA (SATA II also), SCSI and USB hard disks connected to motherboard or external controller cards. The user must be root to use this software or start it with sudo.

List of features:
- display hard disk / solid state disk information on the terminal
- create comprehensive report about the disk system, including both hard disk and SSD specific features (for example, media rotation rate, TRIM command, etc.)
- display and manage acoustic setting of hard disks (on supported USB disks also)
- offers outputs for both users and scripts/other applications to process

The following information are displayed:
- detected hard disk number and device name (for example /dev/sda)
- size, model ID, serial number, revision and interface of all detected hard disks
- temperature, health and performance values
- power on time (days, hour, minutes – if supported)