Just imagine, you manage a server remotely. The server has many disks, one day one of the disk could be failure. How can you tell the onsite engineer which drive is failure? The answer is you need to give the engineer the serial of the drive. So, the next question is , how can i get the serial? When the drive is dead, you can’t not get its serial, so you must record your server hard disk serial number, when something happens, you can access to your document and get it.

Here is the command to get the serial number in Ubuntu:

myuser@netbook:~$ sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Model=WDC WD1600BEVT-22ZCT0, FwRev=11.01A11, SerialNo=WD-WXE509V10362
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=50
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=8192kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=312581808
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6 
 AdvancedPM=yes: unknown setting WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: Unspecified:  ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6,7

 * signifies the current active mode

myuser@netbook:~$