Storage Media		Hard Disks		DVD Disc
	Optical Discs		Tape Media		Flash Drive
	Zip Catridges		RAID		Removable Media
	(U)niversal (B)us (S)erial

Related Hard Disks Topics

	How Hard Disk Works?		Hard Disk Parts and FAT		Hard Disk Myths		MTBF of a Disk Drive
	Password Security Lock		S.M.A.R.T		Upgrade Your Hard Disk		Hard Disk Crash

S.M.A.R.T Technology and Microsoft WMI

S - Self-Monitoring

M - Analysis

A - and

R - Reporting

T - Technology

S.M.A.R.T. is a reliability prediction technology that anticipate the failure of a disc drive with sufficient notice to allow a user to back up data prior to a drive's failure. This technology is applied for both IDE and SCSI drives.

Drive architectures are not all the same, S.M.A.R.T. would therefore carries different set of attributes and thresholds for different drive model. Common attributes that degrade over time are identified as:

• head flying height
• seek error rate
• re-allocated sector count
• spin-up time
• seek time
• spin retry count
• calibration retry count
• data throughput

However, not all failures are predictable. For example a power surge that damages hard disk electronics is an unpredictable failure. Mechanical failures are usually gradual and predictable, and account for 60 percent of drive failure.

The S.M.A.R.T. system technology of attributes and thresholds is similar in IDE and SCSI with only difference in their reporting manner.

With S.M.A.R.T, manageability and predictive failure capability can be provided through the Microsoft® Windows® Management Instrumentation (WMI) in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

Management applications can take advantage of these capabilities in several ways. Examples include taking an action based on seeing the "Failure Predict Event" launch or periodically polling the condition of "Read Failure Predict Status."

Details of WMI can can found in WMI documentation in the Microsoft Platform SDK.