S.M.A.R.T capable but disable

Hi, my PC spacefecations are as follows;
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.1.2600 (WinXP Retail)

Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS Service Pack Service Pack 1
CPU Type AMD Athlon XP-A, 2079 MHz (6.25 x 333) 2800+
Motherboard Name Gigabyte GA-7N400-L (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 4 DIMM, Audio, LAN)
Motherboard Chipset nVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400
System Memory 512 MB (DDR SDRAM)
BIOS Type Award Modular (09/23/03)
Video Adapter RADEON 9600 SERIES (128 MB)
3D Accelerator ATI Radeon 9600 XT (RV360)
Audio Adapter Creative EMU10K2 Audigy Audio Processor

Storage:
Disk Drive Maxtor 2 F020L0 SCSI Disk Device (20 GB, 5400 RPM, Ultra-ATA/133)
Disk Drive Maxtor 6 Y080P0 SCSI Disk Device (80 GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/133)
Optical Drive E-IDE CD-ROM 56X/AKH SCSI CdRom Device (56x CD-ROM)
Optical Drive TDK CDRW482448BC SCSI CdRom Device

Partitions:
C: (NTFS) 20002 MB (5035 MB free)
D: (NTFS) 20002 MB (14032 MB free)
E: (NTFS) 20002 MB (15418 MB free)
F: (NTFS) 18143 MB (17580 MB free)
I: (FAT32) 19867 MB (3450 MB free)

the problem is i have noted that during booting, both HDD's S.M.A.R.T capable but disable, I tried to activate it from the BIOS but I couldn't find any thing related to the S.M.A.R.T thing.
any advice on how to activate this S.M.A.R.T ?

Hi Ahmed,

In my (Award) BIOS there are some hidden settings, including the one for S.M.A.R.T. - I accessed it by either Shift + F! or Ctrl + F1, for the life of me I can't remember which. Try that and see if you can find it.

But S.M.A.R.T really isn't very reliable, I wouldn't put too much faith in it.

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Originally posted by SuperSparks
But S.M.A.R.T really isn't very reliable, I wouldn't put too much faith in it.

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I have to agree on this one. My wife has a heavily used Compaq Armada laptop. The SMART feature tells us since three (!) years, that HD failure is pending, press F! to continue. After F! everything works just fine.
I have other examples of similar behavior, but none for that long.

On the other hand, I had HD's crash w/o any SMART notification.

A good idea, but never thoroughly developed in the industry IMO.

since both of you are not advising on it then i have no choice but to listen to you, thank you so much

I have to add my two cents also. I have not yet seen a S.M.A.R.T. setup that's accurate. My advice is in agreement, not to worry about it at all. You really don't need it.

A related Question:

I've always kept SMART disabled in the BIOS for the same reasons you guys mentioned, alltho I've never actually tried it myself and just forgot about it... After seeing this thread i thought I'd enable it just out of curiosity to see what it says (curious to see what it says about my IBM DeathStar :)).

So, the Questions is... How do i view/check the condition of the drive(s), (or is SMART only something that pops up when a potential problem is detected)?

In the BIOS all i see is an option to disable/enable SMART, and at POST all i see is the status of whether it is enabled/disabled, i don't see anything related to the condition of the drive.

Where should i be looking?

Shortly after hitting the submit button i had a thought... took a look in AIDA32 and sure enough it had a section for SMART, so that's one way to view the drives health status...

...but is there perhaps something built into windows to monitor SMART, if not, how would it notify the user if/when a problem is detected?

Just looked at the SMART entry in AIDA as well.
Seems like only IDE, but not SATA drives are listed there.
Another point against SMART ?

Quote:

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Originally posted by LotusAstra
...but is there perhaps something built into windows to monitor SMART, if not, how would it notify the user if/when a problem is detected?

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anyone?

Sorry, no. You need one of third party apps.

ahh, thank-you :)

i did notice 3rd party apps for this while searching, but thought surely XP already has something built-in...

What about the BIOS, would this notify me, i see someone mentioned above about about "pressing f1 to continue", does it do this on all PC's that have the SMART enabled if a problem is detected?

Thanks :)

If the bios offers a smart monitoring capability in it's setup then it will also have the ability to check the smart status at post/boot and report any problem then.

Cool, thx, in my BIOS it just has the option to enable/disable SMART only, so with it enabled i assume that meets the requirements to be notified of any potential problems at boot, right?

...so, that brings me to perhaps the final questions...

Would there be any side effects from having SMART enabled, ie any performance hit? I assume as long as i don't have any 3rd party software running in windows to constantly monitor SMART there wouldn't be any effect at all, right?

I'm thinking that if there is no drawback from just having SMART enabled in BIOS then i might as well use it, on the other hand, if there's any chance of it causing a slowdown or problems itself then I'll give it a miss... Do you personally have it enabled or disabled?

Quote:

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so with it enabled i assume that meets the requirements to be notified of any potential problems at boot, right?

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That should do it.

There can be some performance hit if smart is constantly being monitored/queried. On the other hand, there really is no need to have something monitoring the status continually. A periodic check is more than sufficient. Having it enabled in bios is no hit though. The hit would really only occur when/if software was busy monitoring.

Thats Great, just what i assumed, so i might as well leave it enabled then since it doesn't cause any harm on its own...

One more thing... so why then is it usually suggested to disable SMART, is it just because one shouldn't put trust into such a feature?

Regards :)