S.M.A.R.T. is self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology for hard drives. This technology used to be an optional component on hard drives, but it is now included on all newly manufactured hard drives. SMART is primarily useful for predictive notification to let you know when a hard drive thinks it is going to fail soon.
Three things must be in place for SMART to work to your benefit.
- SMART support must be enabled in the BIOS of the computer.
- The computer's hard drive must be compatible with SMART interrogation.
- You must have a way of interrogating the hard drive for monitoring purposes.
One way to interrogate the SMART status of the hard drives is to use the smartctl.exe command line tool. Visit the smartmontools site on SourceForge to learn more.
Highly technical readers may wish to also review and article posted on SpeedFan about SMART to learn more.