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Processors Toolkit

Monitor hard drive health with SMARTDefender

Brien M Posey Tech Republic

Published: 21 May 2003 13:37 BST

The Return SMART Status option simply returns the results of your last test. The Short SMART Test performs a quick self-test on the drive. The duration of the test really depends on the size of your hard disk and the speed of your machine. I ran the short test on a 100GB hard drive on a 1GHz Pentium 4 running Windows XP, and the test took about 1 minute to complete. The Extended SMART Test option performs an extended self-test on the drives you select, but don't hold your breath while this one runs.

If you return to the main SMARTDefender screen by clicking Home on the toolbar, you will notice that there are two other options: SMARTStatus and CapacityInformation. SMARTStatus allows you to quickly check the health of your drives. CapacityInformation gives you drive information such as file system, capacity, percent used, percent free, cluster size, and total clusters. Both are based on SMARTDefender's last test.

Configuring SMARTDefender settings
Once you've run an initial test on your drives, it's time to configure SMARTDefender to run the types of tests that will ultimately protect your drives. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can access the settings section by either clicking Settings from the toolbar on the main SMARTDefender screen, or you can right-click the shield icon in the system tray and select Settings.

The Settings window allows you to configure options for both SMARTStatus and CapacityInformation. I'll look at the simpler of the two, the CapacityInformation options, shown in Figure B, first. From the CapacityInformation screen you can choose to enable or disable capacity monitoring by selecting a check box and setting the capacity threshold. By default, this threshold is set to 95 percent.

Figure B

The Capacity screen allows you to monitor a drive's capacity.

There are two things that you need to know about capacity testing. First, the threshold you set applies to all partitions on a drive. Second, drive capacity is checked only when a SMARTTest is run. So you won't get a drive capacity warning message the instant that the threshold is exceeded, but rather, after the next test is run after the threshold is exceeded.