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SMART
technology can save you time and money
We’ve
said it before: all hard drives eventually fail. But is there no
way to predict, even approximately, when that will happen? Actually,
there is a way; it’s called SMART or Self-Monitoring and Reporting
Technology. SMART is a set of hardware monitors built into your
hard drive that allows you to monitor the health of the drive based
on key indicators. SMART uses a number of comprehensive attributes,
such as read/write speed, spin up times and temperature to diagnose
your drive. Most SMART software will automatically inform you of
impending problems, well before they happen. This translates into
an opportunity for you to predict a total failure and ensure that
your critical data is backed up before it happens.
Most SMART software sits idly in
your taskbar and only makes itself apparent when the status of one
or more SMART attributes has changed. Each attribute has a threshold
value and once that threshold has been crossed (i.e. the temperature
rises too high, the drive attempts to spin up too many times, etc.),
the program alerts you of the change. Such changes should then be
taken as warning signs, indicating that the drive may soon fail.
In order to use this fabulous technology, you must have a SMART
monitoring program installed on your computer to read the SMART
indicators. While Macs have this software built into the operating
system, Windows users must find their own programs to use SMART
on their computer. (for directions on how to use Apple’s SMART
utility in OSX, check out our article on maximizing the life of
your Mac hard drive). The Windows world offers plenty of software
options when it comes to SMART monitoring. We’ve chosen two
that we think are most useful, DiskView and ActiveSMART, and reviewed
them side by side here.
DiskView and ActiveSMART.
Alex Bezborodov
Technical Writer
Accurate Data Recovery
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