 |
|
|
Hard disk drives are a mechanical part of your computer system. As such, they are more likely to fail than a solid state processor, video card or stick of RAM. Typical HDD failures can include failure of the spindle motor or bearings causing excessive heat or noise, head assembly failures including improper flying height, head contamination, media degradation etc. S.M.A.R.T. or Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology was introduced into most modern hard drives to help detect and predict these failures. Of cause not all hard drive failures are predictable. Catastrophic events such as electronic component failure etc can occur however the majority of failures occur from the HDD deteriorating over time. MS Windows do not monitor HDDs for failures. BIOS can detect a failure, but only when a threshold is exceeded on the drive. Third party applications exist to periodically monitor the drive and predict the failure date, however these applications cost money and are required to be installed on the computer. Smart and Simple on the other hands is just that. It’s a simple command line utility to read back the SMART attributes from a HDD while in service. It’s a single 31kb executable which can be carried with you on a floppy disk, giving you a quick indication of the health of any disk drive without the burden of installing a sizeable application. Usage To use SMART & Simple is easy. To interrogate the parameters for drive C:, simply run C:\>smart.exe SMART & Simple for Windows NT/2000/XP Copyright 2001-2003 Craig.Peacock@beyondlogic.org Opened Drive \\.\C: . . SMART Enabled : Yes Model Number : WDC WD800JB-00CRA1 Firmware Version : 17.07W17 Serial Number : WD-WMA8E2668332 Drive Size : 80.026 GB ID Attribute Type Threshold Value Worst Raw Status ---- -------------------------- ----- --------- ----- ----- ---------- -------- [01] Raw Read Error Rate Prefailure 51 200 200 0 OK [03] Spin Up Time Prefailure 21 98 94 4191 OK [04] Start/Stop Count Advisory 40 99 99 1008 OK [05] Reallocated Sector Count Prefailure 140 200 200 0 OK [07] Seek Error Rate Prefailure 51 200 200 0 OK [09] Power On Hours Count Advisory 0 98 98 1650 OK [0A] Spin Retry Count Prefailure 51 100 100 0 OK [0B] Calibration Retry Count Prefailure 51 100 100 0 OK [0C] Power Cycle Count Advisory 0 100 100 973 OK [C4] Re-Allocated Data Count Advisory 0 200 200 0 OK [C5] Pending Sector Count Advisory 0 200 200 0 OK [C6] UnCorrectable Sector Count Advisory 0 200 200 0 OK [C7] CRC Error Count Advisory 0 200 253 0 OK [C8] Write Error Rate Prefailure 51 200 200 0 OKIf you need to interogate a physical drive other than C:, the drive can be specified as a argument on the command line. e.g. smart.exe d: Download
Other Unique and Innovative Software Solutions from Beyond Logic
Allow users to run trusted applications from defined directories, while preventing the execution of non-trusted programs from floppy disk and CDROM drives or from the users e-mail attachment directory. Stop PE viruses in their tracks where on Windows platforms year, nine out of ten of the top viruses were spread via e-mail. Want a command line utility to view, kill, suspend or set the priority or affinity of processes, perhaps from a batch file? Kills rouge processes where Window's Task Manager fails. Have you ever wanted to run a process such as an application installer, service pack, virus signature update etc or shutdown a single or group of remote computers without having the burden of installing any remote client on your target computers? Bmail is a free but lean command line SMTP mail sender. Bmail allows the user to automate the sending of email messages containing log files, data downloads or error messages on Win32 based computers. Have you ever had the need to find, copy or delete files that were owned by a certain user? A great way to back up files created by previous employees or to clean workstations when one leaves. A problem that plagues Windows NT/2000/XP, is it's strict control over I/O ports. Unlike Windows 95, 98 or ME, Windows NT/2000/XP will cause an exception (Privileged Instruction) if an attempt is made to access an I/O port that your program is not privileged to access. The PortTalk driver allows existing programs to access selected I/O ports. Want a quick console utility to display the hardware specifications of a PC including Processors Type, Operating System and Service Pack, Physical and Virtual Memory, Network Addresses, Logical Drive information, Video Card Type, Hard Disk, CDROM and Printer Information. |