TECH

S.M.A.R.T. - Outsmarted by hard disks

Sven Krumrey

I break out a sweat whenever one of those warning lights comes on in my car. How about you? Even if it was only signaling a loose ashtray it'd still drive me mad. But these lights are supposed to warn us of imminent danger. And it worked, I knew with absolute certainty that my ancient BMW was done. But that's another story, this one's about computers.

For years I had wondered why PCs didn't come with a similar warning system. You were able to hear when a hard disk was about to break down (it would become louder or emit scratchy noises) or when a power supply unit would begin to stink of molten plastic just before it gave up the ghost. But this was not what usually happened. Usually, you'd just sit there panicking and wondering which data was now forever lost. The clever, disciplined folks among us create regular backups and this may get me kicked out of the holy league of computer scientists but I'm not one of them. Let's hope none of my colleagues is reading this.

Danger ahead!

So I have a vested interest in the health state of my drives. What I didn't know for a long time: Most drives do sound an alarm we just don't take notice. I was surprised when I found out that most drive manufacturers had done their part during the 90s. So-called S.M.A.R.T. technology (Self-monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) has been around since 1996 as part of nearly every modern disk drive. What may sound like a secret spy organization simply reports a couple of parameter values to your drive. This includes temperature, running time, possible errors, performance metrics and a few others. Sounds interesting doesn't it? Since we're talking about computers things naturally aren't that simple because these values don't just appear on your screen.

These values have to be retrieved by special applications that may display something like "ErrorRate: 84 60 30 WOPE". Doesn't ring a bell? Same here. That's because disk drives only report raw values without any data evaluation. And since so many different parameters are meticulously monitored there's plenty of data on errors, defective sectors and other read/write anomalies that mean absolutely nothing to the untrained eye. To make sense of it all, companies like us have developed applications such as Ashampoo HDD Control 3 and WinOptimizer 12 (module HDD Inspector) that perform not only data analysis but also present results in a meaningful fashion (WinOptimizer 12) and offer long-term, permanent disk monitoring (HDD Control 3). Since I'm a security fanatic I'll go with permanent disk monitoring.

Precious and fragile – a hard disk drive.

I've learned that my system has non-critical errors, that 37° Celsius are okay, that my machine has been booted up 775 times with a total running time of 6300 hours. There were no faulty boots, 50 sectors have been marked unusable and the overall health of my drive drive is good. Good to know! I'll admit you might get lost in details and speculation since not all drive manufacturers adhere to the same standards and external drives, ironically often the first choice for data backups, tend not to report any values at all robbing users of a valuable tool to foresee and prevent data loss. Why save a small penny on a tiny component that has the potential to help foresee a crash with potential data loss?

So everything's fine now? In all honesty - no, there's always a remaining risk. Just like the safest car won't be 100% free from damage this is all about minimizing risks. Studies on this topic found that the majority of disk failures were preceded by more or less detectable signals that were covered by SMART technology. These signals may provide valuable evidence that a drive might be nearing failure but even drive manufacturers are unable to forecast this event with absolute certainty. Case in point: Go kick your PC as hard as you can (please don't). No parameter can indicate this event and the same goes for voltage fluctuations and high outside temperatures. Most drive crashes are preceded by drops in performance, delayed response times and increases in error rates. I do have one recommendation though: As soon as one of the SMART values is approaching a critical threshold please create a backup to avoid data loss. You won't regret it.

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16 Comments

Dennis Cambly

Enjoy reading and sharing your articles. Backups are essential and can be fully automated. Win10 made it simpler to backup on the go or schedule it. I use WinOptimizer 12 for cleaning up before the backup. Backup is scheduled daily on a spare drive.

WinOptimizer 12 learns as you use it. I keep the live tuner function running all the time. It is terrific at optimizing services. Less pounding by services demanding access to the hard drives.

Sven we would never kick you "out of the holy league of computer scientists..." There is a specific "ping" when the computer starts that tells you there is a hard drive problem. Been there since the first desktops arrived :)

Peter Hinds

I got sick of loosing data (2 x 2TB and 1x 3TB drives), So I searched the net and found how easy it was to set up RAID 1 / 10 (Stripped and Mirrored) on small self powered towers. It's a little expensive to start but if 1 drive dies all you do is pull it out and replace the same size drive and it will rebuild the data to the new drive.

Sven Krumrey

The professional solution. :)

Peter Rodgers

This a fine explanation and so true. been through it all. From dos to Windows one. (wonder what it is word today?
and so on. Talking about H-Drives Once I got a funny smell. and yes the drive got it. perhaps hot enough to fry eggs.
Of course we keep on going on till some Company do something about it. There is no excuse.
If outer pace satellites can and keep reported from somewhere in the Universe don't tell me that it is impossible to create H-d's which can stand up to computing.
Especially since the HD is the hart of it all.
Thank you for your fine explanation.
Regards P.R

Marc A.

Somehow, an e-mail landed in my inbox. Glad it did and I ended up here. I like details, the more the better in many things, not just Computers. Was aware of SMART, read a little but never delved deep. Have a Utilities Folder on all my machines that contains shortcuts to all the Utilities that I read about, try, buy or whatnot. Faster access than any other method to start them.

Have a shortcut to this blog to look at your products in more detail, when not busy. Quick glance, piqued my interest.

Thank you for spelling out what it exactly SMART does and what programs I can try to interpret data. Good tips on backup, have not lost anything yet, since 1985. I too have suggested to others a backup plan, but I have been lax. But since everything is on this machine, last 6 months purchased 2 External Drives to add to my other one. I now am updating every 3-4 days and rotating drives. Some folders/files I am uploading automatically.

infopowerpro@gmail.com

I like and buy a lot of your products. When I buy a product from you, I need to be able to load it onto all three of my laptops, that I, ALONE, use. Is this concept applicable to any and all products that I may purchase from Ashampoo. Please advise ASAP, at Your earliest convenience. Sincerely.

Thanks You,

Norman J. Abbott
infopowerpro@gmail.com
associates@inbox.com

Sven Krumrey

Since a number of our products incur hefty license fees (for each customer installation) some Ashampoo products can only be installed on a single PC. Products that don’t use third party licenses can be installed on up to three PCs.

Igor

I am using shareware named Hard Disk Sentinel for many years- maybe you know about it.
Backup all on my P.C every month on another HDD included in machine.
It is need to save data in the future.

Hedley Grunsell

...... having been deep into computing since the 1970's I have a tendency to stretch my computer to its limits and this is when you need to know as much as possible about what is going on across your system ... and in this case that is why I use Ashampoo HDD Control

David Clarke

Interesting article. Slight spelling mistake: 'What my sound like a secret' should 'what may sound like a secret'

These blogs are a good idea. Keep up the good work.

Sven Krumrey

Fixed :)

hans ihnen

thanks for the tip. have not backed up for ages .will do it now.

regards hans danke

Roy Metcalfe

Interesting article, thank you. One query, why did my HDD3 a few minutes ago tell me the temperature of my two hard drives were 41 and 42 whereas Win12 claimed 48 (no further action required) and 52 (needs better cooling)? Sometimes the discrepancy is even greater. Can we be believe either of them? Where is the danger point? 50 is said to be OK, but I have had a warning from an other source at 53. At around this point I shut down to allow cooling.

Sven Krumrey

*insert x files theme here* I don´t have the slightest idea. I will pass on your request to our developers.
Feel free to contact our support sis@ashampoo.com

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