Monitor hard drive health with SMARTDefender
Brien M Posey
Published: 21 May 2003 13:37 BST
Let's look at the SMARTStatus settings, shown in Figure C. From here you can control the testing frequency. For example, by default, tests are run every two hours. This means that if your disk starts running low on space, it could be up to two hours before you find out. You can increase the frequency of the testing, but doing so may negatively impact system performance.
Figure C
The main settings screen allows you to configure the testing frequency.
You can also control how often the status is checked, how often short tests are run, and how often extended tests are run. There is even an option to monitor the drive's temperature. If your drive supports temperature monitoring, I highly recommend enabling this test.
Warning messages
You might be wondering what happens when a problem is detected. My drives are all healthy, so I was unable to produce a failure warning, but I was able to generate a threshold warning. A warning is displayed in a pop up window, such as the one shown in Figure D. Unfortunately, SMARTDefender doesn't write a Windows event log or notify you in any other way. This would be a nice feature to see in future versions.
Figure D
This is what a SMARTDefender warning looks like.
The bottom line
SMARTDefender is lacking a few features, but all in all it's a good utility; especially when you consider that it's a freebie. I am now running SMARTDefender on every one of my computers, and I'm sure that I will sleep better at night because of it.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.
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