S.M.A.R.T. readout programs

Topic

New Reply

Both my hard disks and both of the disks I have in my NAS drive have S.M.A.R.T. technology implemented in them according to the manufacturers. Does anyone know how to read out the data or know of a program that will do so.

I have a utility installed on my system (Win 7) called SpeedFan. It is a system monitoring utility that shows temperatures, voltages, etc., and will also allow system fans to be controlled. One of the features is a readout of the S.M.A.R.T. data. Great idea but the S.M.A.R.T. readout doesn’t work on my system. I have no access to the internals of SpeedFan and I bought it mostly to monitor temperatures and voltages so it is useful but I would like to have access to the S.M.A.R.T. data, possibly via some other utility.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Have you tried enabling it from within the bios?

Check through your bios’s advanced functions carefully if your having trouble finding it.

Reply | Quote

I haven’t actually looked for it in the BIOS but I will give it a look.

Reply | Quote

I have looked through the BIOS and can find nothing related to SMART technology so I am still looking for ways to read the data. If anyone knows for certain that it must be implemented in the BIOS and that I perhaps need a BIOS upgrade, I would appreciate known that. I don’t want to try updating the BIOS unless really necessary.

Reply | Quote

Check this link out, it looks pretty cool, and not too expensive either. Keep in mind that with SMART, the NAS may not be compatible, and as you already know your BIOS may not be. I guess what I’m thinking is of SpeedFan can’t read the data, SmartCheck won’t either.

URLToy – SmartCheck

EDIT: I forgot to include the link! Duh!

Reply | Quote

There is a better than good chance that you will not need to upgrade your bios for this…

It’s in there, so look very carefully it’s the only place where one can enable or disable S.M.A.R.T across the board.

(example of mine: Advanced > Boot Configuration Menu)
Try to find documentation specific to your MB’s bios and settings.
A usefull S.M.A.R.T link in it’s own right.

Reply | Quote

Most hard drive manufacturers have diagnostic tools available which usually include one to gather SMART data as well.

Reply | Quote

While searching the web for additional info on this subject, I found the following site.
http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en

They offer a free utility (CrystalDiskInfo) that monitors the SMART info and appears to do everything I want. I have downloaded and installed and it performs as they indicate. I still need to gather more info on how to interpret the results but all the results are there for the internal drives. It won’t touch the NAS drives.

I don’t quite understand why SpeedFan can’t see this data when these people seem to have no trouble.

I will check the BIOS again to see if I am missing something. It would be nice if this data were include all in one place.

Reply | Quote

It would seem my efforts today to find out about SMART is timely. The utility (Crystal Disk Info) indicates the “Relocated Sector Count” parameter on my C: drive is right on the threshold. In addition, the drive is continually operating at, or near, a critical temperature of 60C. It is a Hatachi 500 Mb drive that came with the system. The Utility indicates there is 14,072 hours on the drive and 1,482 Power On Counts. I’m vot sure what the life expectancy of a drive is.

I think I will free up the second internal drive and clone the C: to it and start using it as the C:

As far as I could tell before today, the drive was perfectly happy and working flawlessly. Perhaps it still is but an ounce of prevention and all that…..

Reply | Quote

Smok’en with temps of 60C I wouldn’t have any trouble believing the smart data.
60C is way too hot for a drive, life expectancy goes down. I had similar issues until I installed
2 of these.

If you have the space for them, they are great.

Reply | Quote

I replaced my C: drive (Hitachi 500Gb) with a Western Digital Caviar Black 1000Gb yesterday. Both internal disks now run at, or just under 50C. I would be happier if they were cooler still but I can’t think of any way to add air flow over the drives.

The process was simple. Stuck the new drive into my system (that was the hardest part), cloned the C: drive to the new drive using Acronis True Image and finally changed the SATA cable from the old drive to the new one and reboot. I will keep the old drive around for a while, unchanged, in case the new one should decide to die in its infancy. After that, I will try reformatting and perhaps putting it into an external enclosure for a off-line backup drive.

BTW, the WD Caviar Black is noticeably faster than the Hitachi without being noisy or hot. My Windows Experience Index went up from 5.7 to 5.9 because of the new drive with the drive being the limiting factor on my score.

Reply | Quote