SMART Monitoring

From CGSecurity

Jump to: navigation, search

It is possible to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.

In the hope of anticipating failures, SMART monitors and reports on various indicators of reliability including temperature, number of reallocated sectors and seek errors.

Some advices:

  • Enable SMART monitoring in your BIOS setup. With SMART enabled, if a write operation failed, bad sectors are taken out of service and the data is immediately written to a spare sector. In other words, the bad sector is 'reallocated'.
  • Use a software to report SMART information, this way you get early detection of physical problems
    • smartmontools ΓÇö open-source for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Darwin, OS/2.
    • SMARTReporter ΓÇö open-source for Apple Macintosh
  • If your harddisk is connected via USB or FireWire, SMART status may not be reported, if it's the case, prefer direct connexion like IDE, SCSI, SATA...

Return to TestDisk main page

Data Recovery