Do you enable S.M.A.R.T. ?

[AkumaX]

?

 

[imported_Imp]

I have mines enabled which provides some interesting values in Everest and PC Wizard. The only ones I understand are OK and HD temperature.

 

[Peter]

SMART is always enabled in your drive. The BIOS control, if enabled, just makes the BIOS inquire the SMART status from the drive - once, during POST.

 

[tcsenter]

I've been spared an unexpected hard drive failure three times now thanks to enabling SMART, the most recent being Sunday night on a Western Digital 80GB Caviar SE that is less than two months out of its crappy 1 year warranty. I extended the warranty for the other four WD drives I have, at $15 per drive. No more retail kit Western Digital drives for me (the bulk drives actually have a longer warranty and are cheaper - go figure).

However, be warned that if you ever get a SMART warning, don't assume you have plenty of time to back up your data. Your drive could have many days or weeks before failing, or it may have only many minutes. I immediately prepared a Ghost boot disk and cloned the failing 80GB drive to a spare 120GB drive I had. The 80GB drive bit the dust about 30 minutes later.

 

[Radiohead57]

For data loss purposes yes, for performance no.

 

[Peter]

As I already said above, there is no performance loss.

The drives ALWAYS do their internal monitoring, regardless of the BIOS setting.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I enable it as a safety measure. If it helps me from wondering what the heck happened when my system fails then it's worth it.

 

[Mem]

Interesting replies I did read this from rojakpot.com,

While S.M.A.R.T. looks like a really great safety feature, it isn't really that useful or even necessary for most users. For S.M.A.R.T. to work, it is not just a matter of enabling it in the BIOS. You must also keep a S.M.A.R.T.-aware hardware monitoring utility running in the background all the time.

That's quite alright if the hard disk you are using has a spotty reputation and you need advanced warning of any impending failure. However, hard disks these days are mostly reliable enough to make S.M.A.R.T. redundant. Unless you are running mission-critical applications, it is very unlikely that S.M.A.R.T. will be of any use at all.

With that said, S.M.A.R.T. is still useful in providing a modicum of data loss prevention by continuously monitoring hard disks for signs of impending failure. If you have critical or irreplaceable data, you should enable this BIOS feature and use a S.M.A.R.T.-aware hardware monitoring software. Just don't rely completely on it! Back up your data on a CD or DVD!

Please note that even if you do not use any S.M.A.R.T.-aware utility, enabling S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS uses up some bandwidth because the hard disk will continuously send out data packets. So, if you do not use S.M.A.R.T.-aware utilities or if you do not need that level of real-time reporting, disable HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability for better overall performance.

Some of the newer BIOSes now come with S.M.A.R.T. monitoring support built-in. When you enable HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability, these new BIOSes will automatically check the hard disk's S.M.A.R.T. status at boot-up. However, such a feature has very limited utility as it can only tell you the status of the hard disk at boot-up. Therefore, it is still advisable for you to disable HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability unless you use a proper S.M.A.R.T.-aware monitoring utility.

Link.

 

[Megatomic]

I enable SMART. At least once a week I check through Event Viewer and look to see if I have any warnings about drive failures. This has saved me on more than one occassion.

I :heart: SMART

 

[Peter]

The rojakpot explanation is incorrect, in that the drive doesn't need BIOS to "enable" anything. SMART-equipped drives do their monitoring all the time.

enabling S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS uses up some bandwidth because the hard disk will continuously send out data packets.

This is horribly incorrect. Disk drives don't "send out data packets" unless there is a request from the host to do so. One more time: SMART needs no enabling, and does not inherently cost performance.

Even if you're not using a monitoring utility, having the BIOS poll the SMART status once at boot is useful. This lets you detect close-to-failure drives when you power the machine up. Of course this is useless with servers that are on 24/7.

 

[Aenslead]

There is no reason why not to enable it.

 

[1EZduzit]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
I've been spared an unexpected hard drive failure three times now thanks to enabling SMART, the most recent being Sunday night on a Western Digital 80GB Caviar SE that is less than two months out of its crappy 1 year warranty. I extended the warranty for the other four WD drives I have, at $15 per drive. No more retail kit Western Digital drives for me (the bulk drives actually have a longer warranty and are cheaper - go figure).

However, be warned that if you ever get a SMART warning, don't assume you have plenty of time to back up your data. Your drive could have many days or weeks before failing, or it may have only many minutes. I immediately prepared a Ghost boot disk and cloned the failing 80GB drive to a spare 120GB drive I had. The 80GB drive bit the dust about 30 minutes later.

Too bad you can't do that for your broken. inbred, brain.

 

[grooge]

Originally posted by: Peter
The rojakpot explanation is incorrect, in that the drive doesn't need BIOS to "enable" anything. SMART-equipped drives do their monitoring all the time.

enabling S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS uses up some bandwidth because the hard disk will continuously send out data packets.

This is horribly incorrect. Disk drives don't "send out data packets" unless there is a request from the host to do so. One more time: SMART needs no enabling, and does not inherently cost performance.

Even if you're not using a monitoring utility, having the BIOS poll the SMART status once at boot is useful. This lets you detect close-to-failure drives when you power the machine up. Of course this is useless with servers that are on 24/7.

Peter.. you've been here long enough to know that whenever sound good or fast (SMART, RAID,.. ) or has higher number (DDR2, SATA2,..) is always good....

If it sound good, it is good..

Well, those who understand hardware has some other opinion... (note that there is a big difference in "knowing" and "understanding" the hardware..)

For me, smart is another BIOS option that I don't care... I have good backup and when a drive fail.. well, it fail.

I only had one drive failing on me.. an IBM deskstar.. I enabled smart in my brain and never got another IBM and now, I have tendency to avoid the Hitachi one.. I might give them a try maybe later...

 

[Peter]

SMART is there to give you an early warning, whenever the drive detects that one of its internal operating parameters is going out of bounds. It doesn't always warn before failure - but, from work experience with many thousand drives shipped into customer's systems every year, if SMART says something's wrong then there is something wrong. Enable it, and if a warning appears, you better believe it, back up your data, and replace the drive.

This isn't HAL9000 and "SMART reports failure" is a perfectly good reason to put on an RMA form.

 

[Megatomic]

I agree with Peter 100%. :thumbsup:

 

[LOUISSSSS]

which programs should i use to monitor smart information on both my hdds?

 

[Megatomic]

Event Viewer. I had a drive about to die and SMART was reporting that fact to Windows. I found it while scanning my event viewer while tracking down another problem. I had a few days to back up my data before the drive clicked, then clicked again, and then shut down forever.

 

[FireTech]

Take your pick:
Everest
Speedfan
HD Tune
HDD Health
and a heap more freebies
HD Tune includes a bad sector check which appears to work. It showed up bad sectors in a HDD I have that Seatools subsequently also did.

 

[Howard]

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: tcsenter
I've been spared an unexpected hard drive failure three times now thanks to enabling SMART, the most recent being Sunday night on a Western Digital 80GB Caviar SE that is less than two months out of its crappy 1 year warranty. I extended the warranty for the other four WD drives I have, at $15 per drive. No more retail kit Western Digital drives for me (the bulk drives actually have a longer warranty and are cheaper - go figure).

However, be warned that if you ever get a SMART warning, don't assume you have plenty of time to back up your data. Your drive could have many days or weeks before failing, or it may have only many minutes. I immediately prepared a Ghost boot disk and cloned the failing 80GB drive to a spare 120GB drive I had. The 80GB drive bit the dust about 30 minutes later.

Too bad you can't do that for your broken. inbred, brain.

Good post, troll.

 

[Yeormom]

Didn't realize that the event viewer would display read/write failures for hard drives. Rather interesting...

 

[aidanjm]

I use a little free ware program called HDD Health, which runs in the background monitoring the SMART parameters over time, it gives a little alert if values change etc. I always find it interesting when you first start running a SMART monitoring software - initially you get failure prediction dates that are only weeks away, then as the software gathers more data over time the failure prediction date moves further and further away until it is years away.