Data Clinic Knowledgebase: Data Recovery and Hard Disk reference section > Hard disk SMART - Primer

S.M.A.R.T. - Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology.

S.M.A.R.T. is a reliability prediction technology that anticipates the failure of a disk drive with sufficient notice to allow a user to back up data prior to a drive's failure. This technology is applied to both IDE and SCSI drives.

Drive architectures are not all the same, S.M.A.R.T. would therefore carries different set of attributes and theresholds for different drive model. Common attributes that degrade over time are identified as:

• head flying height
• seek error rate
• re-allocated sector count
• spin-up time
• seek time
• spin retry count
• calibration retry count
• data throughput

However, not all failures are predictable. For example, a power surge that damages hard disk electronics is an unpreditable failure. Mechanical failures are usually gradual and predictable, and account for 60 percent of drive failure.

The S.M.A.R.T. system technology of attributes and thresholds is similar in IDE and SCSI with only differences in their reporting manner.

With S.M.A.R.T, manageability and predictive failure capability can be provided through the Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

Management applications can take advantage of these capabilities in several ways. Examples include taking an action based on seeing the "Failure Predict Event" launch or periodically polling the condition of "Read Failure Predict Status."

Details of WMI can can found in WMI documentation in the Microsoft Platform SDK.