How to get HDD temperature in Linux

Depending on your server room conditions it may be important to be informed about the hard drive temperatures inside of your servers. System administrators may use Bash and cron to write a simple script that can alert them about sudden temperature change. Various command line tools such as inxi or hddtemp can check your HDD temperature and be used inside of a Bash script.

In this tutorial, you will see how to get the temperature of a hard drive disk on a Linux system. The installation instructions and command examples below will get you started.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to install inxi and hddtemp in Linux
• How to use inxi to get HDD temperature
• How to use hddtemp to get HDD temperature
• How to write an HDD temperature monitoring Bash script

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions

Category	Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System	Any Linux distro
Software	inxi, hddtemp
Other	Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions	# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

How to install HDD temperature tools in Linux

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The tools we will be using are not usually included by default on most Linux distros. You can use the appropriate command below to install inxi and hddtemp with your system’s package manager.

To install inxi and hddtemp on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt install inxi hddtemp

To install inxi and hddtemp on Fedora, CentOS, AlmaLinux, and Red Hat:

$ sudo dnf install inxi hddtemp

To install inxi and hddtemp on Arch Linux and Manjaro:

$ sudo pacman -S inxi hddtemp

Get HDD temperature command line examples

First, you can determine the path of your block devices by using commands like fdisk or lsscsi.

$ sudo fdisk -l
OR
$ lsscsi -g

Hard drives will have a path in the format of /dev/sdX for example.

1. Using the inxi tool now we can determine the temperature of all hard drives with the following command.

   $ sudo inxi -xD
   Drives:    HDD Total Size: 75.5GB (70.3% used) ID-1: /dev/sda model: HTS721060G9SA00 size: 60.0GB temp: 35C
              ID-2: USB /dev/sdb model: TransMemory size: 15.5GB temp: 0C
   

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   The hard drive temperature of /dev/sda is 35C. Note that the above command needs to be run with root administrative privileges.

2. Or to check the temperature of a specific block device, just specify that device in your command. For example, this command checks the temperature of /dev/sdb.

   $ sudo inxi -xD /dev/sdb
   

3. The same information can be achieved through the hddtemp command. Here is how to use it.

   $ sudo hddtemp /dev/sda
   /dev/sda: HTS721060G9SA00: 36°C
   

Get HDD temperature Bash script

If your intention is to wire a monitoring script to regularly check hard drive’s temperature, you can use the below script as your starting point:

#!/bin/bash

temperature=$(hddtemp /dev/sda | cut -d : -f3 | sed 's/[^0-9]*//g')

# REPORT when hard drive's temperature is above 50C

if [ $temperature -ge 50 ]; then
	echo "ALERT: hard drive's temperature is above: $temperature"
fi

Closing Thoughts

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In this tutorial, you saw how to get the temperature of a hard drive disk on a Linux system. This is facilitated by the inxi and hddtemp commands, which can easily be installed via package manager on major Linux distros. You also learned how to adapt these commands into a Bash script to regularly monitor HDD temperature and report any major temperature spikes.