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49 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "What Is Smart?"
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permalink: /what-is-smart
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---
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# What is SMART?
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SMART is a technology which provides hard disk drives with methods to
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predict certain kinds of failures with certain chance of success.
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## A Detailed Answer
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Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART, is a
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monitoring system for hard drives to detect and report various indicators
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of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. SMART is implemented
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inside the drives, providing several ways of monitoring the drive health.
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It may present information about general health, various drive attributes
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(for example, number of unreadable sectors), error logs, and so on.
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It may also provide ways to instruct the drive to run various self-tests,
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which may report valuable information. It may even automatically scan
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the disk surface in when the drive is idle, repairing the defects while
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reallocating the data to more safe areas.
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While having SMART sounds perfect, there are some nuances to
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consider. One of the common pitfalls is that it may create a false sense
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of security. That is, a perfectly good SMART data is NOT an indication
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that the drive won't fail the next minute. The reverse is also true - some
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drives may function perfectly even with not-so-good-looking SMART
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data. However, as studies indicate, given a large population of drives,
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some SMART attributes may reliably predict drive failures within up to
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two months.
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Another common mistake is to assume that the attribute values are
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the real physical values, as experienced by the drive. As manufacturers
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do not necessarily agree on precise attribute definitions and
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measurement units, the exact meaning of the attributes may vary
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greatly across different drive models.
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At present SMART is implemented individually by manufacturers.
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While some aspects are standardized for compatibility, others are not.
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In fact, most manufacturers refer the users to their own health
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monitoring utilities and advice against taking SMART data seriously.
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Nevertheless, SMART may prove an effective measure against data loss.
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Yet another issue is that quite often the drives have bugs which
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prevent correct SMART usage. This is usually due to buggy firmware,
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or the manufacturer ignoring the standards. Luckily, smartmontools
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usually detects these bugs and works around them.
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