SMART

[Arcex]

I remember seeing an article about SMART a couple days ago asking if it was any good, thought I'd share this story...


A few days ago one of my HD's crashed, naturally it was the one I used for my OS and programs, not one of my slower storage drives. I ordered a new one (WD Raptor SATA 10K RPM for those that care) which will arrive tomorrow, in the meantime I've been using UBCD4WIN to at least have some OS functionality till it arrives and I can reload my OS.

For the first time since I've been using the boot disk when I turned on the PC I got a SMART error warning me that my primary drive was BAD (capital letters and all). I just found it entirely ironic that it took 4 days of the same dead drive staying dead for SMART to bother warning me.

Thank you for listening to my tale of woe...

 

[Trashman]

kinda like, driving your car, you see smoke coming up from the hood, car dies and idiot light comes on warning you your engine is overheating...i hear ya.

 

[Mark R]

It is better than nothing - but it's certainly not able completely to predict drive failures.

It can predict failures in a drive that is slowly degrading (e.g. getting more and more 'weak' or 'nearly bad' sectors), or if a motor is slowly getting weak. However, many (maybe even most) drive failures are sudden - e.g. a sudden mechanical failure, head crash, etc. In these cases the damage is often severe and rapid.

Perhaps part of the problem is that windows doesn't monitor SMART itself - on most computers, on the BIOS will check the SMART status during POST. If you don't reboot, you;ll never know if there was a warning or not. Of course, if you are truely worried, then you can run monitoring software that will periodically check the drive's status.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Also, if SMART does tell you before the drive totally crashes, odds are you won't be able to boot your system again or recover data - been there, done that. Stupid SMART and WD drives...

There was this one drive that obviously was going bad - click, click, click - and SMART read that drive as being "healthy" too.

Definition of SMART: "Self-Monitoring Analysis And Reporting Technology" - yeah, sure it is :disgust:

 

[Arcex]

Originally posted by: Mark R
It is better than nothing - but it's certainly not able completely to predict drive failures.

It can predict failures in a drive that is slowly degrading (e.g. getting more and more 'weak' or 'nearly bad' sectors), or if a motor is slowly getting weak. However, many (maybe even most) drive failures are sudden - e.g. a sudden mechanical failure, head crash, etc. In these cases the damage is often severe and rapid.

Perhaps part of the problem is that windows doesn't monitor SMART itself - on most computers, on the BIOS will check the SMART status during POST. If you don't reboot, you;ll never know if there was a warning or not. Of course, if you are truely worried, then you can run monitoring software that will periodically check the drive's status.

The point is that the HD had crashed and lost all info on it, OS and all, and I was booting the PC from a boot CD for several days before SMART realized it was dead. Just makes me wonder how dead it had to be before SMART thought it would be worth mentioning...