Handy overview in this article.

"Nothing ever need be a mystery on Linux as it has a large number of excellent utilities for discovering hardware and monitoring hardware health. Here are a handful of good tools for spotting possible hard drive failure, displaying hardware information and monitoring temperatures, fans, voltages, email, music players and more."

-- source: http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/620416-discovering-and-monitoring-hardw...

Cheers, Peter