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S.M.A.R.T. – Saving your data before you know it!
March 29th, 2009
SMART is a monitoring technology build into the electronics of hard drives as a way of the computer monitoring it’s performance and may give warning of pending failure. Though the system is generally one that works without a hitch, it cannot protect you from sudden hardware failure which leaves the drive non-operational. Sudden hardware failure is estimated to account for 60% of all drive failures, and is attributed to rough handling or drops and knocks say a laptop falling onto the floor from your desk. They are designed to withstand specific amount of impact force (measured in G’s) that means a hard drive may survive a fall from a 3-foot desk.
Some smarter hard drives are designed fro laptops with accelerometers detecting the slightest downward acceleration, sending the drive heads to a safe zone where they cannot cause much damage. The read/write heads of modern hard drives float on the disk surface as it spins preventing contact damage to the medium itself. Auto parking the heads to a safe-zone, which is an unused part of the disk prevents the heads from impacting areas where data is store thus allowing it to continue functioning properly. There are however some issues with the technology and some isolated conflicts that causes bizarre behavior but disabling the feature through the bios setup menu quickly resolves the issue.