Anyone here use S.M.A.R.T.?

being that my first samsung HM320JI drive died in less than a years use, I am very paranoid with my toshiba MK3252GSX..... anyone here use S.M.A.R.T., and if so is it worth it? is there a noticeable performance decrease? which software do you recommend?

I figure since m1530 can only mount 1 hdd, it pays to be paranoid on how the HDD is doing.....

 

Every hard drive made in the last decade has SMART in some flavor or another. There's no "using" it or "not using" it. SMART is just a monitoring system, so it doesn't do anything to affect the performance of your drive or to lower the chances of a hard drive failure. Problems indicated by SMART are usually signs of an imminent drive failure, but oftentimes, a drive may fail even if the SMART vitals are perfect. Less often, the opposite is true too.

I've found that the best software for reading SMART data is SpeedFan, but most HDD diagnostic and benchmarking software will suffice, ye ole HDTune included.

 

notebook hardware control is a great software for laptops

 

I seriously recommend you dont use notebook hardware control, ive tried it on several systems, and the temperature monitoring in it is off by miles, it stops the fans coming on at time even though the temperatures are in excess! and it scatters icons all over your system tray.

cpuid.com HW monitor is better for temperature monitoring, HD-Tune, gives you smart readings,

 

hmmm i tried using HDTune

But on the health (SMART) tab, there is nothing on it

Anyone knows why ?

 

Hi.

HDtune seems to be very picky on which hdd controller driver it likes.

I have an INTEL chipset, but if i use the INTEL sata driver , I get 0 SMART data , also 0 HDD feature data.

But if i install the standard microsoft sata hdd controller driver , I get the all the SMART and HDD feature data.

This has happened to me on a few notebooks i have had.

Also disabling AHCI in the BIOS will normally help, but use this as a last resort as it can cause problems.

Regards

John.

 

SMART may be disabled in your BIOS. If you happen to be using the drive in an external enclosure, you will not be able to read SMART values either.

 

Thx Tinderbox and Commander Wolf for the answers

I think im just gonna leave it as is ... too much trouble to go through whole thing to get something that is not very reliable.

 

I use ActiveSMART on several computers and it has warned me of impending drive failures in the past (confirming reallocation of sectors which had not yet got so bad that Windows knew about it).

Ariolic have a version which can also monitor at least some of the SMART parameters of USB drives of the following types:
- Western Digital Passport hard drives
- I-O Data hard drives
- Trekstor USB boxes
(though I don't have that version)

If you are thinking of trying this application I suggest waiting for V2.7 to come out of beta as it has better service management and is more friendly for stopping USB drives ( the old version tended to prevent clean removal).

 

Speedfan is more smart friendly than HD Tune.

 

I ran a diagnostic program that apparently read some sort of a log that was in my HM320JI.... apparently the drive went as high as 127 fahrenheit at one point and triggered some sort of a warning.... didnt know hardrives kept logs of this kind.