SMART and Simple for NT/2000/XP

[milentechie]

SMART and Simple for NT/2000/XP


Synopsis:
S.M.A.R.T. or Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology was introduced into most modern hard drives to help detect and predict these failures. Of cause not all hard drive failures are predictable. Catastrophic events such as electronic component failure etc can occur however the majority of failures occur from the HDD deteriorating over time.

MS Windows do not monitor HDDs for failures. BIOS can detect a failure, but only when a threshold is exceeded on the drive. Third party applications exist to periodically monitor the drive and predict the failure date, however these applications cost money and are required to be installed on the computer.

Smart and Simple on the other hands is just that. It’s a simple command line utility to read back the SMART attributes from a HDD while in service. It’s a single 31kb executable which can be carried with you on a floppy disk, giving you a quick indication of the health of any disk drive without the burden of installing a sizeable application.

License: Freeware

Website: http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/smart/smart.htm

Download: http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/smart/smart101.zip

[Andrew Lee]

FYI, command-line apps will not be posted to the database, but I won't stop you posting it to the forum.

I thought the recent Google paper already dismisses the correlation between SMART parameters and HDD failure?

The other surprising finding:

there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot.

HDD failure is found to be more correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age than anything else.