SMART - Technology?

kmistry · 2 Dec 2006 at 12:39

I have just discovered through Speedfan that I can enable SMART technology for my HDD. Now i have been reading about this and it seems like it is a good idea as it allows you to find potential problems and correct them/save data before your hard drive dies. What's the general consensus on this sort of thing, have many people used this? Should I enable it on my drive? Thanks in advance. Spec is in sig in case you need it

Kiz

EDIT: No actually I was being a nab, you can't enable it from Speedfan, it just tells you some stuff....errors etc. Can I enable this through BIOS then perhaps ?

semi-pro waster · 2 Dec 2006 at 12:41

It is handy to check on the health status of your drive and I don't think it offers any downsides so I'd definitely enable it. At a guess I'd imagine most people who know about it use it from time to time just to get a rough idea of the drives health.

kmistry · 2 Dec 2006 at 12:46

Aha, ta semi-pro

manoz · 2 Dec 2006 at 12:58

I think it's great but it stopped working when I RAID 0ed my drives, now I can't get the temp or smart stuff through speed fan. Just a warning.Maybe someone knows a way around this?

allllec · 2 Dec 2006 at 13:03

nice idea - but to be honest its never actualy given me any indication as to a drive failing in the near future - while im board i must check the smart status of my drives atleast twice a day and ive still have one or two drives fail on me with no warning

5tephen · 3 Dec 2006 at 03:14

allllec said:
nice idea - but to be honest its never actualy given me any indication as to a drive failing in the near future - while im board i must check the smart status of my drives atleast twice a day and ive still have one or two drives fail on me with no warning

That's obviously because none of your drives are going to fail any time soon

I had 4xHitachi 250Gb drives (2xRAID 0) and one of them was making weird noises from time to time when accessing, but I couldn't tell which one it was. The drives were connected to my Gigabyte DS4 and RAIDed with the Intel Matrix software - eventually in the Intel RAID bootup screen it told me that a "SMART error occurred" with one of my drives. The drive was indeed on the way out, because sometimes Windows would load and other times it wouldn't. I got enough use out of the drive to back up all my stuff

The Windows-based Intel RAID software also told me the serial number and channel number of the drive just like the DOS version, and throws up a warning icon in the system tray.

Also, I repaired corrupted sectors in the failing hard drive which brought it back to normal again, but within a few days the SMART software started complaining again

So I've since sent the drive away. But that was mighty handy, being warned so well in advance of the drive failing.