GSmartControl - Hard disk drive health inspection tool
GSmartControl is a new tool that has a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools, which is a tool for
querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting
Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the
drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on
it.
Note: Only ATA drives (both PATA and SATA) are supported for now.
Features
- Automatically report and hilight any abnormal SMART information.
- Ability to enable / disable SMART.
- Ability to enable / disable Automatic Offline Data Collection - A short
- self-check that the drive will perform automatically every four hours with no impact on performance.
- Ability to set global and per-drive options for smartctl.
- Display drive identity, capabilities, attributes, error and self-test logs.
- Perform SMART self-tests.
- Ability to load smartctl output as a "virtual" device, which acts just like a real (read-only) device.
- Works on most smartctl-supported operating systems.
- Extensive help information.
What is SMART?
Short answer: SMART is a technology which provides hard disk drives with
methods to predict certain kinds of failures with certain chance of success.
Long answer: read below.
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART, is a
monitoring system for hard drives to detect and report various indicators of
reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. It is implemented inside
the drives SMART provides several ways of monitoring hard drive health. It
may provide information about general health, various drive attributes (for
example, number of unreadable sectors), error logs, and so on. It may also
provide ways to instruct the drive to run various self-tests, which may report
valuable information. It may even automatically scan the disk surface in when
the drive is idle, and repair the defects, reallocating the data to more safe
areas.
While having SMART sounds really good, there are some nuances to consider. One
of the commond pitfalls is that it may create a false sense of security. That
is, a perfectly good SMART data is NOT an indication that the drive won't fail
the next minute. The reverse is also true - some drives may function perfectly
even with not-so-good-looking SMART data. However, as studies indicate, given
a large population of drives, some SMART attributes may reliably predict
drive failures within up to two months.
Another common mistake is to assume that the attribute values are the real
physical values, as experienced by the drive. As manufacturers do not
necessarily agree on precise attribute definitions and measurement units, the
exact meaning of the attributes may vary greatly across different drive
models.
At present SMART is implemented individually by manufacturers, and while some
aspects are standardized for compatibility, others are not. In fact, most
manufacturers refer the users to their own health monitoring utilities, and
advice against taking SMART data seriously. Nevertheless, SMART may prove an
effective measure against data loss.
Yet another issue is that quite often the drives have bugs which prevent
correct SMART usage. This is usually due to buggy firmware, or the
manufacturer ignoring the standard. Luckily, smartmontools usually detects
these bugs and works around them.
Howto Install:
Download Here
Double click and click install, then execute it via Applications-> System Tools->GSmartControl
Developers Site Here
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