Smart Hard Drive Information
Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) is a technology used by all modern hard drives, which allows a drive to monitor its own errors and predict when those errors might become serious enough to cause drive failure. SMART can provide an early warning of many types of hard drive issues, and when it works as intended, can give the user enough time to back their data up before complete hard drive failure.
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Function
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SMART tracks many aspects of a hard drive's performance, such as its internal temperature, the amount of time it takes for the motor to spin up, read/write failures and how many times files have had to be moved due to areas of the hard drive that have gone bad. Each value has a preset threshold. Once a SMART threshold has been reached, the hard drive is likely to fail.
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Identification
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Most computers have the ability to report a SMART Threshold Exceeds Condition (TEC) state to the user. Generally, this will happen when the computer is first turned on, before the operating system loads. This message varies between computer manufacturers, but will say something similar to "Hard Drive Failure Imminent." If this message is seen, all data on the hard drive must be backed up immediately to prevent loss of information.
Early Warning
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It is possible to check the SMART status of a hard drive using drive monitoring utilities. PassMark DiskCheckup is a utility that checks the health of a drive, reporting whether any SMART thresholds have been exceeded and whether any are likely to be exceeded in the near future. DiskCheckup can be configured to run in the background and provide an early warning if a problem arises.
Considerations
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All drive manufacturers do not implement SMART codes in the same way, but most have their own utilities to check the health of their drives. If a SMART threshold is found to be exceeded using a third-party utility, this should be verified using a utility provided by the manufacturer before the drive is replaced.
Limitations
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There are times when a hard drive can fail in a manner that SMART cannot predict, such as failure due to a sudden mechanical issue or user error. SMART should never be treated as a replacement for data backups.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit "Hard Disk Interleave(s) :)" is Copyrighted by Flickr user: Matt and Kim Rudge (Matt Rudge) under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
