SMART is Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, SMART. And it's when we got the IDE drives that manufacturers like Compaq that were big users, consumers of these drives, they said we need some way of knowing what's going on in there. Now that you've moved the controller in there, you've got this integrated drive electronics, this IDE. It's a black box. How do we know how good it is, how solid it is, how long it's going to last? We'd like to know, before it dies, that it's getting kind of flaky in there. But thanks to having moved the electronics in there, we can't see into that anymore. We need some visibility into the drive. That's what the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology gives us, theoretically, is an API, a means of asking the drive about things going on inside. It's a classic case of politics. The manufacturers did not want to provide this information.
So the problem with SMART is that - and I learned this when I added that technology -
SpinRite 6 is the first version of
SpinRite to dynamically monitor the drive's SMART system while it's running. And what I learned was that the SMART system is only useful when the drive is under load, that is, when it's doing work. And that's the beauty of
SpinRite's use of the SMART system. There's a SMART analysis page in the
SpinRite UI which shows you in real-time, for example, the amount of error correction the drive is doing per megabyte of data read. And it shows you the high point, the low point, and the average over time. So you're able to judge, literally in an analog fashion, judge the quality of the current quality of the drive when it's doing work.
The SMART system means nothing when you're not asking the drive to read things because it's only in reading that it has a potential problem. So it's one thing, it's sort of nice to have the SMART system around in the background. But unless you actually are watching it while you do a scan across the drive, it's not going to tell you that much. And of course the manufacturers know that. They're like, they're not wanting to actually demonstrate that, like create a means for judging drives, because then manufacturers would reject some of them.
