[latitude]

It is indeed pretty OS specific.

Not the SMART part, but how you talk to the drives and controllers and how storage is generally sliced into partitions, volumes, etc. Windows has a fairly comprehensive version of Software RAID, but in true Microsoft fashion they do things ass-backwards in more than one place. For example, striped volumes (RAID 0) will use only a part of a partition for each stripe, but to learn that you'd have to talk to Virtual Disk Service rather than regular Disk/Volume management API. This is, basically, as unportable as it gets.