Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Active SMART
Iain Laskey gets advanced warning of disasters
| Product | Active SMART |
|---|---|
| Company | Ariolic Software |
| Web | www.ariolic.com Click here to buy |
| Price | $24.95 (approx £15) |
| We like | Flexible fully featured early warning system |
| We don't like | It can't spot every failure, sometimes too many warnings |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
Hard drives aren't always the most reliable of devices. Most fail sooner or later. It might be months, it might be years but the chances are it will happen. When they do die, your precious data dies with them. Of course, you can always restore from your backups, which you of course make religiously. However, most people don't bother with backups so what else can you do to help survive a failure?
SMART was introduced some years ago and pretty much all recent hard drives support it. SMART tracks various performance parameters of your hard drive and compares them to a threshold level. Once this is approached or worse still, breached, SMART calculates the TEC date for the drive. The TEC (Threshold Exceed Condition) date is the date at which SMART estimates your drive will fail.
A typical example might be if the spin up time of your drive starts to increase. This could indicate the motor is starting to wear out. Another possibility is that the write error count is starting to increase. Normally, errors are handled transparently by the drive up to a given point. You could be blissfully unaware that the drive's disk surface is starting to fail and until it does so, often catastrophically, you'll never know it was coming.
Active SMART 2.41 from Ariolic Software sits quietly in the background and monitors the SMART status of your hard drives. If any of the parameters changes, it warns you. It will also display the TEC date should one appear for any given parameter.
Active SMART can be downloaded and initially installs as a fully functional 30 day demo. If you decide it is useful, you can then register it and continue using it. Active SMART is extremely flexible. The default settings are fine but if you find a drive fluctuating within reasonable limits, you can manually set the point at which it will warn you of change. This helps avoid a constant stream of messages. Every change is logged so you can always see a history of what is going on. Warnings can be simple pop up messages, emails or network messages. The latter two are useful if you manage a number of PCs on a network and don't want to be bothered with regular checks.
Once a TEC date has been issued, you can take a decision as to how you want to proceed. The wisest move would be to back the drive up, bin it and restore to a new one. However, the TEC date can be several months in the future so you may want to leave things a bit longer whilst further monitoring what is going on.
We tried Active SMART on two PCs, one using the demo version, the other using the fully registered version. One showed a clean bill of health. Alarmingly, the other showed all three hard drives were showing high levels of problems. TEC dates showed for one or more parameters on each drive. The drives still seemed to work OK and a full Scandisk showed no problems. Needless to say, we're now watching these drives very closely. More bizarrely, the manufacturers own diagnostics showed no problems so either Active SMART is extra vigilant or things aren't quite as bad as they seem.
Active SMART is also handy for checking your basic disk info such as partition sizes, support for DMA and PIO modes and the current temperature. You can also trigger a warning if the drive gets too hot.
So, on the face of it, Active SMART works well and has enough flexibility to suit most people's needs. What is less clear cut is just how reliable SMART itself is as a technology. It's good for drives which are degrading slowly or just getting worn out. What it can't possibly hope to cope with is a single major failure such a logic board failure or a head crash. With this in mind, it is best not to rely totally on SMART.
Conclusion
Active SMART is a neat tool. For the price it offers additional peace of mind. Don't rely on it as your only tool for protecting your data but treat it as another gizmo in your box of tricks along with regular backups.
