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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