martian said:Yes neyo, enabling SMART option for the hdd in the BIOS will help you know when your HDD is going to crash.
SMART technonogy in HDDs stand for "Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology". It is an effort by drive manufacturers to help users avoid data loss by incorporating logic into their drives that acts as an "early warning system" for pending drive problems.
The HDDs integrated controller works with various sensors to monitor various aspects of the drive's performance, determines from this information if the drive is behaving normally or not, and makes available status information to software that probes the drive and looks at it. It aids in predictable failures.
There's a possibility that enabling SMART may cause spontaneous reboots in networked computers. SMART may be sending packets of data through the network even though there's nothing monitoring those data packets... This may cause spontaneous reboots. So to avoid reboots or crashes while you are on a network, SMART is disabled by default.janitha said:But somebody may pl explain why SMART is disabled in bios by default.
sakumar79 said:Also, I remember vaguely that using SMART will decrease the life of the HDD a little bit (since it will do read/write operations that contribute to wear&tear of HD)
Arun
No, I'm not stressing on that Prem... What I say is SMART has minimal use in ones home PC. SMART is like a diagnostic test on HDDs that's often put to much stress (say working 24/7). Our HDDs are never stressed that much!janitha said:So in short can we presume that enabling it is not that necessay, especially since nowadays we keep backups of imp files in Cds/DVDs etc?