Smart Hard Disks 

SMART (Self Monitoring, Analyses and Reporting Technology) helps automatically monitor the health of a hard-disk drive and report it to the user in case of potential problems. These drives are prepared with PFA (Predictive Failure Analysis) technology developed by IBM. This technology measures selected drive attributes (such as 'head-to-disk flying height') and when values cross predefined thresholds, it raises a warning. IBM was the first to ship hard drives that could sense and predict their own failures. Hard-disk manufacturers accepted this technology and it became the industry standard, now known as SMART.

Hard-drive failures can be caused due to two factors, one unpredictable and other one predictable. Unpredictable failures cannot generate a warning before-hand and we can only take precautions against letting them happen. They are caused by factors such as static electricity, handling problems, and thermal or solder problems. Predictive parameters such as decrease in hard-disk performance, read/write errors, over heating, head contamination and motor failure, on the other hand, can be monitored using predefined thresholds. This can then be used to intimate the user before the drive fails. This technology can be used on both PCs and servers and can help you take timely backups to prevent data loss.

While the earlier versions of SMART could simply monitor hard drives, SMART III, the latest version, can also prevent failure by repairing the sector errors.

There are many, shareware and commercial software available that fetch SMART intimations from the hard drive and warn users. Some hard-disk manufacturers ship disk-monitoring software (based on SMART) with their IDE and SCSI drives. In this article we tell you how to use SMART utilities on your PCs and servers.

SMART IDE Guardian 7.1 is a tool that periodically analyzes on-line hard drives on your system and checks attributes such as spin-up time, raw read error rate, seek rate, reallocated sector count, start/stop count, write error rate, drive temperature and drive power cycle count. When these attributes exceed pre-defined thresholds, then alert messages are generated.

You can download a 30-day trial copy of SIGuardian 7.1 from their website:

http://smartlinux.sourceforge.net/smart/dload.php. Install this tool on any Windows PC and you will get the SMART IDE Guardian icon in your system tray. To configure it, double click this icon. Click on the Option tab and then on the Wizard button. In the wizard, select 'Choose from preset mode' and click on Next. Then select 'Maximum Protection', click on Next and then on Save. SIGuardian will continue to run in the background and monitor your hard-drive's health.

To get periodic reports on your hard-disk's health, from the interface select the SMART tab and click on 'Save to HTML'. This will periodically save disk health reports as an HTML file.

Sanjay Majumder