S.M.A.R.T. Capability?

[jonnyjack]

what exactly does this feature do? my hard drive is a maxtor 20gb @ 5400rpms and i noticed this setting under the BIOS...can anyone tell me what it is and if i should use it? my specs are in my sig...

 

[SaturnX]

SMART basically just informs you of the status of your drive, for example, it there are bad clusters, etc, or if anything else is wrong with the drive. I personally use, to monitor my harddrive, and so my recommendation is that you should use it.

--Mark

 

[Lord Evermore]

Having SMART enabled doesn't do too much though if you don't have diagnostic software the monitors it.

 

[Modus]

Actually, S.M.A.R.T is a potential lifesaver. Just a few weeks ago, I had a customer who's BIOS reported "HDD Bad. Backup, repair and replace." The drive appeared to be working normally, but who knows when it would have completely died. Enabling S.M.A.R.T alerted us that the physical integrity of the drive was possibly compromised, and allowed us to RMA it without any serious data loss.

I believe S.M.A.R.T works by monitoring the amount of times the drive controller encounters an error when reading from the disc. A certain amount of retries is probably normal, but if it gets excessive, S.M.A.R.T decides the drive has almost had it and lets you know. Groovy.

Modus

 

[jonnyjack]

great! thanks...i certainly don't want to lose all my info even though i do back up the most important stuff...no one likes a dead hard drive