what is a "near-line" hard disk?

[Alex Hunsley]

My 6month old Maxtor SATA HD (200gb) was overheating, so I took it back
to the shop and a replacement was taking time to come in, and they
offered to sell me a Maxtor 250gb SATA disk for the price difference. I
opted to do this, but have discovered that the drive doesn't support
SMART! The type is MaxLine Plus II 250gb. Maxtor's web page about
nearline drives is here:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ata/enterprise_applications/maxline_plus_ii/

it seems to suggest that the drive I've got isn't for desktop, and is
suitable for backup and network storage. So, should I be using this
drive for a desktop machine? I'm annoyed that it doesn't support SMART
technology because this means I can't monitor the HD temperature, which
was what went wrong before!
Are there any big differences between near-line and desktop disks?
Is it just a labelling thing, apart from the lack of SMART?

cheerio
alex

 

[Ron Reaugh]

My 6month old Maxtor SATA HD (200gb) was overheating, so I took it back
to the shop and a replacement was taking time to come in, and they
offered to sell me a Maxtor 250gb SATA disk for the price difference. I
opted to do this, but have discovered that the drive doesn't support
SMART! The type is MaxLine Plus II 250gb. Maxtor's web page about
nearline drives is here:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ata/enterprise_applications/maxline_plus_ii/

That drive is of higher quality than the ordinary desktop drive and DOES
support SMART:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/m...ns/MaXLine Plus II&productview=Specifications

"S.M.A.R.T. compliant "

I'm not aware of any current ATA HDs that do NOT support SMART.

 

[Alex Hunsley]

My 6month old Maxtor SATA HD (200gb) was overheating, so I took it back
to the shop and a replacement was taking time to come in, and they
offered to sell me a Maxtor 250gb SATA disk for the price difference. I
opted to do this, but have discovered that the drive doesn't support
SMART! The type is MaxLine Plus II 250gb. Maxtor's web page about
nearline drives is here:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ata/enterprise_applications/maxline_plus_ii/

That drive is of higher quality than the ordinary desktop drive and DOES
support SMART:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/m...ns/MaXLine Plus II&productview=Specifications

"S.M.A.R.T. compliant "

I'm not aware of any current ATA HDs that do NOT support SMART.

Oops, my bad! The reason I thought it didn't supoprt smart is that a smart
application reporter it had no smart support, and then I couldn't see SMART
metnioned on the maxtor page - obviously didn't look hard enough!

Can anyone recommend a decent (and preferably free, as in beer) HD smart
monitoring program? I am particularly interested in the temperature of the HD....

thanks!
alex

 

[Alex Hunsley]

My 6month old Maxtor SATA HD (200gb) was overheating, so I took it back
to the shop and a replacement was taking time to come in, and they
offered to sell me a Maxtor 250gb SATA disk for the price difference. I
opted to do this, but have discovered that the drive doesn't support
SMART! The type is MaxLine Plus II 250gb. Maxtor's web page about
nearline drives is here:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ata/enterprise_applications/maxline_plus_ii/


That drive is of higher quality than the ordinary desktop drive and DOES
support SMART:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/m...ns/MaXLine Plus II&productview=Specifications


"S.M.A.R.T. compliant "

I'm not aware of any current ATA HDs that do NOT support SMART.

Oops, my bad! The reason I thought it didn't supoprt smart is that a
smart application reporter it had no smart support, and then I couldn't
see SMART metnioned on the maxtor page - obviously didn't look hard enough!

Can anyone recommend a decent (and preferably free, as in beer) HD smart
monitoring program? I am particularly interested in the temperature of
the HD....

thanks!
alex

Right, I've got to the bottom of why I thought my drive doesn't support
smart...
various SMART temperature monitoring utils, that show the temp in the
sys tray in windows, seem to miss out my SMART drive and only show the
temp of two IDE drives attached to the system! The one program that
*does* show temp. for my maxtor SATA drive, Active Smart (I got a demo
from http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/), seems to have problems too:
half of the time it reports my maxtor SATA drive as smart compliant, and
shows and temp, and the other half it says "drive not smart compliant".
Faulty drive?

lex