On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 11:49:30AM +0100, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> S.M.A.R.T. is supposed to be an industry standard. Now, disk
> manufacturers can on one hand implement only a part of the
> parameters or introduce extensions to this standard; some other
> times they might have their own interpretation of what a parameter
> should mean.
There a vendor-specific and vendor-neutral things you can poll.
Mostly the interesting ones are vendor-specific and I've not found a
source for information about these.
> My impression is that it doesn't depend on whether they are cheap
> drives or not, but more on the manufacturer - f.e. I got almost the
> same parameters for IBM drives from different drive families of
> various ages (last 2 years or so).
I get different values for almost identical Maxtor drives on the same
age....
> IDE controllers cards or mainboards have had S.M.A.R.T. related
> functions for several years - I have Intel 440BX based mainboards
> from 1998 that offer the option of enabling it and give a warning
> message if something is wrong with the disk at boot time.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I don't think controllers and/or
mainboards need to know anything about SMART at all... presumably the
BIOS knowledge here allows you to disable it in case the OS gets
confused or something.
--cw
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