Predict Potential Disk Failure with S.MA.R.T Mon Software.

Predicting Hard Drive Failure?
Failures can be seen from two standpoints: predictable and unpredictable. Unpredictable failures, such as power surges that can cause failure, occur quickly. Predictable failures are characterized by degradation of an attribute over time, before the disk drive fails. Many mechanical failures are typically considered predictable because of degradation in a disk drive's attributes such as head flying height, which would indicate a potential head crash. Certain electronic failures also show degradation before failing.

How does S.M.A.R.T MON Work?
SMART Disk Monitor is a Windows-specific utility that monitors your disk hardware with the goal of identifying disks that have a strong possibility of crashing. This provides you a window of opportunity to gracefully remove data from a failing disk and put it out-of-comission before your disk drive takes you out-of-comission. Our software allows you to access the predictive failure functionality native to most disk drives. This hardware feature is called S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu, Quantum, Western Digital, and other drive manufacturers put this feature into their disk drives. Typical attributes that are monitored include head flying height, temperature, spin-up time, retries, and internal error logs. If a drive is running outside of a vendor's specification standards, then our software alerts the user.

S.M.A.R.T MON Technical Specifications:
Supported Host Operating Systems and Devices: Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 (Intel-based) running SCSI, Fibre Channel, SSA, SAS, SATA or IDE disk drives or peripherals. In general, if your operating system "sees" the device, our software will work with it. (That means if you have a hardware RAID controller that presents a logical representation of your physical devices, then the software won't detect or monitor the devices behind it). The software supports up to 127 disk drives, and 16 controllers. Disk requirement is 5 MB, minimum screen resolution 800x600.

If your drives or tapes are in a SES-compliant or SAF-TE compliant enclosure, then the software will monitor it and provide you programmable alerts for enclosure component failures, such as power supply, fan, or battery problems.

Polling Frequency: Configurable from "Never Poll", to auto-poll every 1-99999999 seconds.

Event Notification: The SMART Disk Monitor has an imbedded E-MAIL engine which will send an appropriate E-MAIL message to the administrator of your choice which will have the specific drive, error message and time stamp of the event. You can even send test messages, and have a special header to indicate an automated message. If you have a TCP/IP connection, the software will use it. If you access your mail server via modem, then the software will automatically dial out and connect to it if need be, providing your dialer automatically enters your username and password.

Automated Actions: In an event of a predictive drive failure, then a user-configurable automated script will start up. This script can be used to begin a backup procedure, or invoke some other error recovery or notification procedure.

Event Filtering: Editable ASCII filter file lets you control the sense key, code and qualifier combinations that would generate an E-MAIL notification. You can also control them specifically by adapter, SCSI ID, and LUN. Wildcards and ranges are supported.

Detailed Sense Code Information: Log and mode sense information is manufacturer and model-specific. We have an editable ASCII database that cross-references the cryptic codes into the specific text. If your drive is not in our database, then it will have a generic message, such as "Predictive Failure Analysis Threshold Reached on Recovered Error". If your drive is in our database, you may also get a trailer that adds, "Fly Height Change Problem, Recommend Device Replacement". As drives are encoded into our database, updates will be posted on our website for free download.

Reported Vital Product Data: Regardless of the make or model of disk, you will be able to access the following information on all devices -- manufacturer; drive model; SCSI device type; firmware revision level; # of factory defects; transfer size (8-bit,16-bit,32-bit, or serial); Removable Medium Y/N; and lots of information pertaining to the predictive failure (S.M.A.R.T.) capability.
You can now also view the primary partition tables on your disk drives.

Advanced Vital Product Data: This information is drive specific, and is currently available on over 100 makes and models. A partial list includes -- serial number; microcode level; date of manufacture; and assembly versions/part numbers. You may also enter user-defined inquiry fields from any vital product data page.

Statistical Information: This information is drive specific, and is currently available on most IBM and Seagate disks. Some of these fields include: Total recoverable/unrecoverable read, write, and verify errors; ECC errors; current drive temperature; # of hours drive has been powered up -- Was the drive you just purchased new?!!; # of "grown" defects

Caching Parameters: Lets you view exactly how the cache & buffers are configured. You can also enable or disable 12 different cache-related settings, including enabling your disk's write cache, and controlling maximum and minimum # of read-ahead blocks.

Exception Handling: In addition to enabling S.M.A.R.T., you can control the disk's informational timers, exception testing, error logging, and performance when running internal diagnostics.

Mode Page Editor: The mode page editor lets you view all mode pages defined for a particular disk, and make changes to current and default pages. (You have to have the corporate edition to make changes, however).

Miscellaneous: True Low-level formatter which lets you either keep or destroy the grown defect list, read sense codes, read all inquiry pages, read raw sectors, read partition tables, load, unload, lock, and unlock devices with removeable media.

Data Recovery Tip

#8: Do not attempt to solve the problem yourself when your hard drive is making any unusual noise. Running any utilities will make the situation worse.