Tuesday, April 23, 2013

HDD S.M.A.R.T. capability disabled

If you have encountered the following during start-up:

HDD S.M.A.R.T. capability disabled

and you want to enable it, this can be done on your boot menu.

  • Go to your boot menu - Restart your computer then go to your boot menu
  • Navigate on the menu - Look on your boot menu until you see the HDD S.M.A.R.T capability. There are only two options for this Enable/Disable. It should currently be disabled, change it to enabled.
  • Save changes and reboot.
Simple enough but before doing so, here are some insights regarding HDD S.M.A.R.T. capability

HDD S.M.A.R.T. (which stands for Hard Disk Drive Self Monitoring Analysis and Report Technology) is a BIOS feature that monitors a hard disk's current status. Its most basic function is to provide prediction and report impending failure of your hard disk (or in a more simplistic word when it is dying) during POST.

However, with a S.M.A.R.T. aware program installed on your machine running in the background, it can provide real time condition of your hard drive. It should be noted that hard disks nowadays are very reliable thus the S.M.A.R.T. utility don't seem to be much of use. Even by saying that, it is still a good practice to enable it once in a while just to check your hard disk's status by checking if there is any messages saying that your hard is dying. This is specially true if your hard disk is more than 5 years old. If none is reported, you can breathe easy as your hard disk is fine.

Note though that even with just the S.M.A.R.T. alone it uses some system resources much more so if a S.M.A.R.T. aware utility is installed.

Still, the best practice is to occasionally back-up your data specially if your hard disk contains very important documents.

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