What is SMART?
SMART stands for self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology. It’s a standard for predicting the likelihood of impending failure for a hard disk. The software originated at Western Digital and was later integrated into the ATA standard. You enable SMART support in the system BIOS. It’s used by drives of the ATA-3 standard and above.
SMART checks a drive and establishes a threshold for its performance in several areas. It can then notify the user when any of those measurements falls below the performance threshold, possibly signaling an impending drive failure. Some of the factors it checks are head floating height, data throughput performance, spin-up time, seek error rate, seek time performance, and drive calibration retry count...
...Some utilities, such as Norton Utilities, provide a SMART status indicator as part of their Windows-based controls, but this is not really necessary. If SMART detects a problem, it will pass an error message to you through your operating system, so you can back up your important files before your hard disk fails.
SMART is different from the active disk-checking utilities that you might run, such as ScanDisk or Norton Disk Doctor. These utilities check the logical organization of the file allocation table (FAT), followed by an optional physical check of the disk surface. They do not monitor any of the drive-performance factors, such as the number of times that the drive has to retry a certain function before it succeeds. In addition, these active utilities must be user-initiated, either manually by running a program or automatically by using some sort of scheduling agent, such as the Task Scheduler in Windows 9x. So you really need both SMART and a disk-utility program such as ScanDisk for best data-integrity assurance.
