SMART on or off?

[NTAC]

Its disabled right now, wondering if I should enable, any significant purpose?

 

[M0RPH]

It can warn you of potential problems with your hard drives. Why would you NOT turn it on?

 

[n7]

I definitely like it on.

 

[taltamir]

turn it on.
SMART could warn you of immenent drive failure. COULD is the key word. AFAIK it will not have false positives, but it will only catch some of the failures ahead of time. So your drive can still fail without warning, but smart might warn you.

Also, smart lets you monitor the drive better using various programs within windows.

 

[NTAC]

It can warn you of potential problems with your hard drives. Why would you NOT turn it on?

I don't know, it's off by default... I'll turn it on.

 

[C1]

Enabling SMART incurs a small amount of HDD overhead. (I actually can notice it like when using the drive to watch movies from, but it is livable.) Even when BIOS SMART was disabled, I still got a notice at boot time once when one of my HDDs began to fail & I was able to backup & replace the drive in time.

 

[taltamir]

Enabling SMART incurs a small amount of HDD overhead. (I actually can notice it like when using the drive to watch movies from, but it is livable.) Even when BIOS SMART was disabled, I still got a notice at boot time once when one of my HDDs began to fail & I was able to backup & replace the drive in time.

that is pretty odd, this shouldn't be the case (both of those things that is)... sounds to me like an issue with your mobo.

 

[Mark R]

SMART should have almost no overhead. The only effect that might be noticeable is background bad sector scans. However, these only occur when the drive has been completely idle for several minutes, and stop immediately when the drive has work to do.

Some SMART software can trigger a manual SMART bad sector scan. Manually activated scans don't stop when the drive is active, but they do yield. The performance dip is therefore only slight, but you may get noticeable seeking when you normally don't (e.g. watching movies)

 

[Russwinters]

SMART is on whether you select it off or not.


All the SMART option on the motherboard does is tell the chipset to watch SMART as well.


The HDD always records SMART no matter what.



Regards,

 

[C1]

This sounds right.

The BIOS section of the MB user/installation guide warns of slightly increased overhead with SMART enabled. So the slight increased overhead with HDD activity is no doubt coming from the chipset monitoring. Again, the overhead is very slight & the average person probably wouldnt notice it. If there is an issue (ie, with SMART not enabled), there's a good chance it will be picked up at boot.

 

[Russwinters]

Yep, the option just tells the mobo chipset to be "aware" of SMART, and to keep an eye on it. The motherboard really has not much pull in updating the SMART tables.

HDD have firmware (OS) and run independent from the rest of the system. They perform their own maintenance all of the time.

The data that is stored on the HDD isn't even in the same pattern of binary as present on the OS. HDD use several types of encoding to work properly (RLL and PRML).

OS sees the hard drive as LBA (Logical Block Address), but the HDD internally still uses CHS scheme, and translates in real time between it's addressing, and the OS addressing.

It keeps track of SMART the same way, in real time without your knowledge.

 

[taltamir]

which still bring us back to the question, should he "enable" "SMART" in his bios.
the HDD is always tracking it regardless, and enabling it merely means the motherboard bios is going to watch smart. this SHOULDN'T cause any problems.. but it is within the realm of possibility for a motherboard to have a firmware bug causing it to have problems when it tries to watch the smart data from HDDs. such an issue would be confined to specific firmware revision on speicifc make/model of mobo, but such an issue could exist.

I say, enable it, if it causes problems you can always disable it later.

 

[C1]

Whether or not to enable SMART in the BIOS probably will be a function of your confidence in your system drives. My experience has been with drives failing gracefully versus catastrophically. So I'll get a SMART warning that something is up before total failure. (By-the-way, always be alert for any unexplained system slow downs. Run frequent disk checks/scans & in the event of unexplained slow downs run HDD diagnostic scans.)

So I would say that you should enable SMART for sure under any of these conditions:

- You leave the system run continuously (days at a time)
- The HDDs have a lot of hours on them
- Youve already experienced one or more HDD failures
- Data safety is an absolute priority concern

 

[taltamir]

or just back up your data, that way a HDD failure just means the inconvenience of restoring your data from backups instead of actual loss.