S.M.A.R.T and IDE

miinkiemiinkie UK
edited December 2003 in Hardware
Heya all. found this forum on a search when i was having some probs with pc i was building.

Been checking the forums out and awesome amount of knowledge here :wow:

Main Q is what is SMART on IDE HD and is there an adv or disadv to enabling it from CMOS setup?

Oh BTW folding@home here

Comments

  • DogSoldierDogSoldier The heart of radical Amish country..
    edited December 2003
    SMART is a self diagnostic. I disable it in my BIOS. Up to you really, but it does improve performance slightly with it turned off.
  • miinkiemiinkie UK
    edited December 2003
    DogSoldier wrote:
    I disable it in my BIOS. Up to you really, but it does improve performance slightly with it turned off.

    How slight is slight IIMA
  • NecropolisNecropolis Hawarden, Wales Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    On a new system not so much as you will notice unless you are a benchmarker. I just tend to leave it off. As for your folding question take a look here . That will tell you all you need to know.
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Hey miinkie: Thanks for signing up, and thanks for joining the folding team :)

    You have a welcome thread here.

    SMART was something that I believe Western Digital came up with a few years back. It stands for something monitoring and reporting technology or something along those lines. It was supposed to tell you if your hard drive is failing before it actually failed.

    Now, with that said, let me tell you this:

    I have built hundreds and hundreds of computers over those years and I have had dozens of failed hard drives. NEVER ONCE has SMART alerted me to a drive that was about to fail. Therefore, I see it as totally useless. I vote "turn it off".

    My .02
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology. The reason they drive didn't tell you it was about to fail is because it couldn't. You need to run some sort of SMART reading software to see what the drive is saying, otherwise you won't see it (it has no-one to tell). It may show up in the System logs in XP and 2k, but that is hardly obvious. There are a few programs you can grab that are only around 200k or so and they give you all the SMART information constantly, errors, spin up times, temperature and lots of other info. So you may be interested in it anyway.
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    But you can enable SMART monitoring in most modern BIOS' and the bios will give you an error at post if there's an entry in the SMART log.

    Either way, I say S.M.A.R.T S.U.C.K.S
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