Hard Drive Information Tool

Assuming these are SMART drives you can use the following method with Disk Checkup.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/252428-32-long-hard-drive-used

... unless someone has reset the S.M.A.R.T. data via the serial diagnostic port. Pretty silly to do that though as you can cross check the date code printed on the label (although admittedly the drives could sit on a shelf unused for several years).

I use Crystal DiskInfo tool for that: https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/
See my example screenshot.
CrystalDiskInfo-7.6.0-.png

I ran both Crystal DiskInfo  and Disk Checkup on a single internal and external hard drives and both worked well.
Although, for the look of it, I liked Crystall Disk Info better.
When I ran both on the servers where there is a RAID system, it was only able to say "Virtual HD - size of HD" and no more information.
So if I buy one of these Seagate 600 GB SAS hard drives, I better attach them to RAID controller card and run these software to get the number of hours before I put them in RAID array, right?

Yes, you should be able to do that.

Thank you and good luck with the drives

The RAID controller management software may be able to get some of the SMART data for you, it's in HPE's ADU report for example although you need to know how to interpret it.

[edit] BTW, you shouldn't use generic disks on a branded RAID controller, so if it's a Dell controller then use Dell branded disks or if it is HPE controller then use HPE disks. If it's a generic controller such as LSI then generic disks are recommended.

All the above answers are incredibly, horribly wrong.  Every one of them.  This is a SAS drive not a SATA.  Those shots and references all refer to feature sets applicable to drives that use the ATA instruction set, not SCSI instruction set.  All the info on screen shots aren't applicable.  You might as well be looking at settings for a USB stick or floppy disk.  The are equally irrelevant.

The mechanism to access runtime hours for disks that use the SCSI instruction set / SAS transport (including Fibre channel) are saved in LOG pages.  Seagate standardized several field with their SAS product line.   There are two mechanisms,  one reads a log page and another reads a log subpage. (Log page 1C subpage 1).  I cant remember the other one off top of my head, but think it is page 1A.   There are applications whatnot decode it but they aren't free, and are going to be O/S specific .. if you have a RAID controller, then you can pretty much forget it unless you have a short list of controllers and programs designed for that specific controller and the desired log pages and they enumerate it properly.

FYI - somebody who knows what they are doing can programmatically reset those counters on Seagate disks.  I won't give any hints, but I certainly know how to do it.  I expect you won't find to many scumbag resellers who would do this .. but if you are worried about the cumulative runtime hours and don't look at counters for bytes read/written, grown defects, cumulative disparity errors and a bunch of other things then you could very much get deceived.  

If the drives are behind a RAID controller, then you have to run a controller which will allow access to that info.   I am not aware of any controller software other than the ones I have written that will decode this info as it is a lot of work to write and acquiring such information requires a lot of work.

The SANTOOLS software / SANTOOLS.COM will set you back more than what you paid for the drives to get this information because it is overkill for just that.

David, how come Santools isn't in the list here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools

@Dave,
 
Thank you for the correction in your posting (ID: 42513049). Yes I ran testing on SATA HDs, not SAS.
Next week as soon as I get some 600GB SAS HDs,  I plan on connecting them to the RAID controller in a test Server and try Crystal DiskInfo  and Disk Checkup. I will report back.

You don't have to report back, we already know that those disk check utilities are useless if the disks are behind a RAID controller.

As Andy wrote, neither one of those products will work behind a RAID controller.  Don't waste your time.  It is possible to get what you need behind the Dell-branded PERC, MegaRAID, and MPT-SAS/Fusion type controllers, but no consumer-oriented software will do that.  You'd have to pay a great deal of money to get what you want in that environment.

@Andy, reason why the SANTOOLS is not listed on Wikipage is the SANTOOLS software is more of OEM software.  It isn't consumer-oriented solution.   It is way too powerful.  Like I wrote above, one could use it to reset the I/O counters in that Seagate drive, or to reprogram disk to report that it has a different number of block (smaller) then what is really there,  or generate ECC errors so you can do proper benchmarking with error injection, just to name a few features .. , great stuff for appliance manufacturers, but too dangerous for people who aren't storage engineers.


And yes, it does work on those SAS disks when they are behind several of the controllers, but I'm not going to blindly say all controllers.  The APIs changed, in fact 4 different versions of the MPT-fusion API alone now, so if you wanted to know if it worked for any specific card it would have to be qualified.

Such are the problems with dealing in pass-through SCSI cmds via pass-through RAID controllers via pass-thorough device drivers.   Very tricky, very expensive, very time consuming to qualify.