These days most hard drives are equipped with Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T. also known as SMART. SMART technology is built in to hard drives using ATA/IDE or SCSI interfaces.

The technology was initiated by Compaq in 1995 and was standardized by a joint collective effort between Western Digital Corporation, Quantum Corporation, Seagate Technology Inc., IBM, and Conner Peripherals Inc., which continues to make revisions to SMART. It’s used basically to monitor all performance functions of a hard drive and to issue alerts if potential failures are detected.

Some of the vital hard drive functions that are monitored by SMART include disk functionality, sectors that may be damaged, drive heads, the temperature of the drive and CRC errors. So the technology is essential for making sure that your business undertakings are not jeopardized by a failing hard drive, as you can feasibly back up the disk before it fails, so long as you know ahead of time.

SMART hard drives are standard equipment on most computers nowadays. But to tap into the full potential of SMART technology it’s necessary to invest in software to help you monitor your system properly. It’s not ordinarily easy to figure out if SMART has found something wrong unless you are a professional systems administrator who knows how to monitor system processes accurately. That’s why it may be a wise decision to invest in third-party software to help you out.

There are plenty of SMART resources out there to choose from, and doing a Google search will give you plenty of ideas. A good place to start is a table of various SMART tools and what they do at Wikipedia. Many solutions tend to be freeware, while others cost around $20. If you are a novice user consider trying HDD Health, a downloadable program for computers running Windows that will alert you in a straightforward manner if impeding hard drive failures are on the way. The program operates unobtrusively in the background so your work isn’t impeded. There are SMART solutions available for computers running Mac OS X, Linux, and DOS as well.

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