No SMART in BIOS?

[DragonQ0105]

On my dad's Gigabyte 7S748-L, the BIOS has no setting for SMART on any HDDs. When the bootup log thingy comes up (after the memory test), it says "Primary Master HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability: Disabled", indicating that it can be enabled, but I can't find it in the BIOS.

Does SMART not exist on this board's BIOS? (It is the latest 'F5' Version). Does anyone have any experiences with these boards?

 

[BlayneRTFM]

Usually the message "s.m.a.r.t. capability:disabled" means that your hard drive supports the feature but your motherboard does not.

If your getting this message and can't find any settings for for s.m.a.r.t. features then your mobo doesn't support it.

Since you say you already have the latest bios version, I would suggest trying a third-party software utility such as Norton System Works to take advantage of S.M.A.R.T capabilities.

 

[bcastner]

BlayneRTFM,

I was with you up till the Norton SystemWorks.

For SMART to work:
1. the hard disk has to be SMART capable
2. the worksation BIOS has to be SMART capable

The error message states that #2 is not true.

Perhaps Norton can query the SMART databse on a drive, I honestly do not know.

But for a SMART drive to work, both #1 and #2 above have to be true.

 

[bcastner]

I feel compelled to make one last thought.

I bought off big time on the SMART concept, and implemented utilities to monitor all of my SMART enabled hard disk drives.

I wish I could tell you that this helped in a proactive way to replace failing workstation drives, and keep things humming.

It was, (an opinion), a total waste of money on the utility software, and a total waste of time on my network staff to read the reports each day/week.

I am talking about very good to excellent SMART monitoring utilities, that could remotely scan my network workstation SMART drives and give me incredible reports on drive health.

But too often Susie's reports would show no issue, but when Susie started her machine in the morning if showed a drive SMART failure warning from the BIOS. When this first happened I would assure Susie to just hit F2 and continue, that this was a fluke. Wrong. If you get a SMART error on startup from the BIOS you darn well better back up everything you can. That drive is dead.

SMART was a good idea, but to be honest with you it did not help me a bit.

 

[bcastner]

For the curious, the original SMART concept was that hard disk drives had either predicatable slow declines in performance, or unpredicatable and catastrophic errors.

Personally, I have never seen the predictable slow decline that IBM claims, but they know more about drives than I do. In this instance, (if you believe it), SMART can help. For the unpredicatable and catastrophic nobody can predict (although IBM with its Deathstar series should have a lot of experience).

In any case, read the underlying premise for SMART. In the most promising scernario you can see how SMART could help; my honest opinion is that drives just do not act like this, and therefore SMART is dubios. I grant the case if reserved sectors are contantly being re-allocated due to hard errors. But unfortunately, when this happened it was immediately followed by the second scenario. For the second scenario, SMART will not help. It has no predictive value for a catastrophic failure.

But read, and make up your own minds:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/qual/features.htm

(Note the chart)

Best,
Bill Castner

 

[G0AOZ]

I agree with BCastner's comments. After seeing hundreds of HDDs over the last 10 years, I can recall only ever seeing two drives report SMART errors. I think one I was able to copy, but the other failed. Usually a drive works one day, but totally fails the next, although occasionally you can hear a drive that's going bad.

ROGER.

 

[TrojanSquirrel]

I agree.. I've currently got an IBM Deathstar 40GB drive in one of my PC's and it had a tendency to make strange 'double squeek/beep' noises now and again! For the most part it seems fine, and I get no error reports at all on that drive. It has been doing the 'squeek beep' for a year of two now.... but I'm not confident that it will see the year out!

 

[jurgen36]

Bcastner
NeoR77V
I agree completely with your comments regarding smartdrive.
There is also another issue involved. Enabling smartdrive actually slows the drives down by a measured (in our comp. lab) 10 to 12 %. Ok it can help with some issues but overall I would say it is a waste of time and money.
With all our drive failures we very rarely, if ever, got any smart drive warnings. Just the opposite we have drives which according to smartdrive are defective, but are still working error free for more the two years. The best protection is backup, backup and again backup. Regards

Jurgen

 

[bcastner]

jurgen36,

Your experience duplicates my own. After having my staff scan thousands of pages of SMART reports, I still had the issue that Susie (my mythical client) would turn on here machine to find the drive dead with a BIOS SMART error.

SMART monitoring was a complete waste of time and money. Rather invest your money as you stated in backup, backup, backup.

I can accept that hard disks will fail. What I object to is the time, attention and money spent in a worthless effort to get a handle on the issue; and therefore act in a responsible and proactive way.

SMART was an enormous waste of time, attention and money.

 

[bcastner]

NeoR77V,

I think you were lucky. One thing I was convinced of from my SMART experience was that if the BIOS reported a SMART error on startup, the drive should be replaced immediately.

Sure, you can disable BIOS support for SMART and avoid any warnings. but if you have the 40 or 50 IBM Deathstars, or the 40gb drives from any manufacturer, respect the SMART warnings.

The drive is going to be dead very soon. If the drive is under warranty, do not hesitate to call the manufacturer and get a replacement.