By Mike Williams/ Posted on 8/27/2014

 

http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/HDDGuardian-600x341.jpg

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system which reports on various reliability indicators, and sometimes highlights imminent hardware failure of HDDs and SSDs.

These predictions can sometimes be questionable, but SMART still has plenty to offer, and the open source HDD Guardian (also available in a portable edition) provides a simple and straightforward way to find out more.

 Launch the program and its Overview tab displays a basic system summary: your hard drives, their temperature, reliability score, bad sectors and ATA errors, amongst others.

The Manage tab expands on this, in particular with a "S.M.A.R.T. attributes" section which lists all the drive’s raw data. These are the details you’ve seen in other SMART software: spin-up time, error rates, retry counts, power on times, and so on. You probably won’t know what most of the figures mean -- we don’t, either -- but just spotting high values, or being able to compare error rates between drives, can provide useful information.

 

betanews/ full article here/ http://betanews.com/2014/08/27/hdd-guardian-tests-and-monitors-your-hard-drive-health/