As far as performance difference. None. Of course to monitor SMART information you'd have to constantly run a program in XP to monitor the SMART information which in some small way would take up some resources but not really. It would be nice if NT had more hardware monitoring capability built-in but I guess they haven't thought of that yet.

OK.... S.M.A.R.T. is one of the coolest things to happen to drives in a long time. Let me give you an example over the last week of my life. Sometime on thursday night my home server BSOD'd while I was sleeping. I noted the ide.sys was the cause and this gave me reason to be a bit worried. Upon reboot, the Atlas 10K2 notified me it was failing and to make a backup as soon as possible. SO I booted into XP and backed up, figuring "better safe than sorry" but figuring it was just some sort of "glitch" related to the BSOD. Well... I was wrong. Friday morning the hard drive started "Screaming" with that bansaw, gonna tear your house down, bad bearings at 10,000 rpm sound. Good thing I made that backup. The point being is that S.M.A.R.T saved my data and gave me fair warning before the drive actually failed.
 
The next hard part was to get the thinged RMA'd through quantum. Umm... Who the heck am I supposed to call for support now. Lesse' quantum HD division got bought by who? oh yeah, Maxtor, who got bought by who? Western digital. Dang, I shoulda bought an IBM... looks like Maxtor support was still in business and I got an RMA.

kinda cool, however, i make backups even when my hardware is good.

Exactly.
 
I backup my critical data on CD-RW. I have it on my file server and make those files "available offline" to my other two. That way, I've still got two rigs with the data on it in which to burn CD's too...unless the one with the burner goes down ;(

great minds think alike

Personally I just use RAID as it was intended, as a way of having redundent devices.
My RAID array allows for any one HD to fail and most combinations of two HD's to fail without any kind of data loss.
So OK I loose some of my maximum capacity, but I've still got plenty of storage space, cheaper than sorting out a dedicated file server and I get the added advantage of a HD performance increase.

I don't have no 2 hd's i have 1 hd with 2 partions and alot of dead hd's buti have to find a safe way to backup all my stored items

Quote:
Upon reboot, the Atlas 10K2 notified me it was failing and to make a backup as soon as possible. SO I booted into XP and backed up...


What do you mean by that ? When did you exactly get that warning message ? I assume before the boot sequence actually started... so the BIOS took care of informing you. So you don't really need a software running in the background to be saved by S.M.A.R.T., it just needs to be enabled in the BIOS and if something's wrong we'll get a message upon a reboot. BTW, did you had to press spacebar to continue or the message just appeared and you happened to see it ?

Many qestions eh ? I know this technology seems really great and I want to take advantage of it.

Thanks

I never knew that smart would let youk now that your drive is going bad or gonna mess up

Lagaff:D Yes it was the bios and I had to hit the space bar.

Quote:



What do you mean by that ? When did you exactly get that warning message ? I assume before the boot sequence actually started... so the BIOS took care of informing you. So you don't really need a software running in the background to be saved by S.M.A.R.T., it just needs to be enabled in the BIOS and if something's wrong we'll get a message upon a reboot. BTW, did you had to press spacebar to continue or the message just appeared and you happened to see it ?

Many qestions eh ? I know this technology seems really great and I want to take advantage of it.

Thanks

I've gotten that same exact thing with SMART enabled. HAd a client call said they kept getting a message when booting saying.
BAD BLOCK on HDD, Backup and Replace.
It was right, there was a BAd block on the Harddrive. baacked it up, replaced it and everything is fine. Cool.''

Mike

That is really great to know. I can rest in peace knowing that I'll be informed if something's wrong with a hdd without having to run a monitoring software all the time.
 
Thanks for the info!