Get S.M.A.R.T.

[bfonnes]

Ok, no this post is not about a TV show

Well, like most people I have hard drives in my computer. I am hoping maybe I can that holographic storage someday...

I am wondering if any of my hard drives have the S.M.A.R.T. hardware monitoring built in. Is there some way that I can find this out through software if a drive has this feature. If either of my hard drives do have it, how do I turn it on or use it? I am going to check Western Digital's web site, but if I don't find anything, any tips would be great... One more question how hot do most hard drives run, and how hot should they run at maximum.

Bfonnes

 

[AndyHui]

You might want to check this out.

All modern drives support SMART.

 

[ProviaFan]

You can enable SMART in the BIOS, usually under Advanced Settings or some similar menu. It will tell you if it thinks you're going to loose a hard drive in a few weeks, and usually it's right (in my experience).

 

[Jeff7]

Is SMART really all that accurate though? I've had a few HDD's fail over the years, with SMART enabled in the BIOS - and it would tell me at bootup that SMART was active on the drives - and nothing ever warned me of impending doom.


Ok, does anyone know how the heck I have the first post in here, even though I didn't start the thread????
Edit: Seems to be related to Daylight savings time - link in Forum Issues.

 

[XMan]

"Missed it by thaaaaaaaaat much."

 

[Pink0]

Yeah, smart doesn't catch everything but it's best to have it enabled. There's no point in not having it enabled just because there's a chance that it might not catch something. If there is something going on that it can catch it's best to have it tell you about it. Turning it off is like not having a police force just because there's a chance that they won't catch all the criminals.

 

[dszd0g]

Originally posted by: Pink0
Yeah, smart doesn't catch everything but it's best to have it enabled. There's no point in not having it enabled just because there's a chance that it might not catch something. If there is something going on that it can catch it's best to have it tell you about it. Turning it off is like not having a police force just because there's a chance that they won't catch all the criminals.

One takes a fairly heavy performance hit from enabling S.M.A.R.T. from what I've heard. The systems I care about are all SCSI, and I can't find anywhere on my SCSI systems to enable S.M.A.R.T. (the BIOS has it for IDE). S.M.A.R.T. can catch somewhere around 70-80% of the types of mechanical failures that occur. I have not had it enabled on any of my machines so I can't say how well it actually works.

 

[AndyHui]

There is minimal performance overhead with SMART enabled.

 

[Derango]

Originally posted by: AndyHui
There is minimal performance overhead with SMART enabled.

Yep, I have smart enabled all the time on my drives, and I get no noticable decrease in performance. Its worth the small price for a chance to save your data. (although you really should be making backups anyway )