Use it the same as you would on any other Linux system.
The man page is here, courtesy of Google.
The normal sequence is to do something like this:

## Enable the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring in the drive firmware:
smartctl -s on /dev/hdc

## Check current drive status. "-a" means "all", or "everything":
smartctl -a /dev/hdc

Then scour the output looking for error reports.
(and post the complete output here for us to help with)

If you don't see any errors, then do the "cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdc"
thing again (sorry), and this time the drive will record errors
for later retrieval with smartctl -a

Cheers