Guys, I’m having trouble getting the smartmontools thing to work. I’ve enabled SMART in the BIOS and with the terminal command:
smartctl -s on /dev/sda1
But whatever else I try, I get the message:
Smartctl open device: /dev/sda1 failed: Permission denied
Put sudo in front of that command 
Oh, for goodness’ sake. Rookie error of the day. Cheers.
You can read the SMART data in the “Disks” utility too.
[EDIT]
After a crash from plugging in the iPad, can you also attach your
/var/log/dmesg
and
/var/log/dmesg.0
files to your next posting