:: Disk Drive SMART Status
SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a diagnostic
method originally developed by IBM Corporation for their mainframe drives to
give advanced warning of drive failures. Large mainframe data centers wanted
to know in advance if a disk drive was going to fail, because this gave them
the opportunity to take steps to protect their data. Today all major disk
drive manufacturers support SMART, including IBM, Western Digital, Quantum,
Seagate, and Fujitsu.
How can SMART help a PC end-user? Not all disk drive failures are
predictable, but many mechanical failures are predictable and this is where
SMART can be of help. SMART measures many attributes of your disk drive over
time and decides if they are moving out of tolerance. Knowing that your disk
drive is going to fail and doing something about it, is infinitely better
than having one crash in the middle of your work. Backing up your disk drive
and possibly replacing it are far better options than trying to recover data
from a failed drive.
Keep in mind that most disk drives, even if they are SMART enabled, do not
have SMART turned on by default. When you install the BelManage client on a
PC, it will turn on SMART and begin tracking your drive health. SMART is
only useful when monitored over a period of time.
Shown below are sample SMART attributes. Each drive manufacturer uses its
own set of attributes to measure drive health.
Head flying height data
Throughput performance
Spin-up time
Re-allocated sector count
Seek error rate
Seek time performance
Spin try recount
Drive calibration retry count
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