hard drive S.M.A.R.T.

SMART is a system to monitor the health of your hard drive.

Unless your hard drive is SMART compatible, there is no benefit in enableing SMART in BIOS setup.

Chas

Most new hard drives are SMART enabled (except SCSI hard drives, which do not support SMART).
The main feature of SMART is pre-emtive warning of imminent disk failure or data corruption.
This has been of some benefit to me. A customer recently called saying that they had a SMART error appear. I arrived and backed up their data to be on the safe side. Within 2 weeks the users phoned up to say that the could not use the computer, and the imfamous 1700 series error appeared (Hard disk drive error). At least I had a recent copy of the clients data to restore.
In a sense it is a good idea to enable SMART, any thing that helps you to maintain a good working system is definately a benift.

S.M.A.R.T. is "Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology" and if your drive supports it (most modern IDE drives do) I would recommend using it.

Take a look here for Samsung's whitepaper on SMART (including a good overview of what it is and how it works):

http://www.samsung.com.sg/hdd/tech_info/white_papers_05.html

Delete any spaces in the above URL.

Hope this helps...good luck!

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