SMART?

[twitchee2]

waht is SMART? should it be enabled? waht does it do?

 

[imported_Tick]

It monitors hard disk. It can hurt preformance, and cause silly compatibility problems. But it can be handy.

 

[V00D00]

SMART stands for Self Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology.

SMART is an interface between a computer's BIOS and the hard drive. If SMART is enabled when a computer is set up, the BIOS can receive analytical information from the hard drive and determine whether to send the user a warning message about possible future failure of the hard drive.

SMART monitors elements of possible long term drive failure, such as 'Spin Up Time', the number of start/stops, the number of hours powered on and the temperature.

You can download a utility here called Disk Checkup to display SMART information:
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

 

[twitchee2]

i was going thought the bios in my ultra-d i just thought it might be somthing to activate. i think its something to enable right?

 

[Codegen]

I've got it enabled on both my P4 and the P233 (Old IBM Mobile HD in it, surprised it's not dead yet). I love 44-pin to 40-pin adapters.

 

[V00D00]

I say enable it, but it doesn't really matter. I have some high-end HP workstations that will say "SMART has detected iminent drive failure", which is good to know... but I don't know if your computer supports that... so I guess you're mileage will vary. Enable it if you're feeling saucy.

 

[shabby]

SMRT?

 

[OdiN]

Just so you know...if it does predict that it will die - replace the drive. It's pretty good about it.

I had a customer bring a computer in for problems. Said she went somewhere else to have it fixed before but didn't like them.

What happened was she took it in with a SMART error. They "fixed" it by turning it off in the BIOS and leaving the drive in there....probably charged her for a new drive too.

 

[V00D00]

har har har. Yeah, when you get a SMART error, it pretty much means the drive is going to die very very soon, and you shouldn't be trusting any data on it.

Although, you can run a utility like SpinRite from grc.com and if you are only getting SMART errors because there are a lot of bad clusters, at least you can mark them as unusable and the drive will still function fairly well.

 

[imported_Tick]

Course, some of us use RAID 5, an hence just wait till a drive actually fails, the swap it.

 

[mOeeOm]

lol this was my first post in this forum When I got a SMART warning and didn't know what it means....then 3 weeks later BOOM!

 

[mOeeOm]

Originally posted by: Tick
It monitors hard disk. It can hurt preformance, and cause silly compatibility problems. But it can be handy.

Care to expand on that? :S