XP can't see any SATA SMART data - is this normal ?

[swayzak]

My new drives are just listed as RAID/SCSI devices (each is installed as RAID 1+0) - no manufacturer, temperature (via HDTach) etc.

Is there anyway I can access the data from Windows ?

MB = Asus P4PE

thanks

swayzak

 

[mike99]

I have Nforce4 and RAID0, having same problem. Have tried several SMART monitor programs without success.

Mike.

 

[swayzak]

Maybe it's bacause my board is old ?

It's as though the SATA drives connection to Windows gives no data at all - the only thing there is the total capacity of the drive (which is all that is listed in the Promise 376 BIOS).

HDTach shows that these drives all have many measurement parameters available - it just doesn't seem to be able to access any of them.

If they work OK I'm not really bothered - but would be nice to see temps & get SMART warning from BIOS if imminently about to fail.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

When hard drives are being used in a RAID setup, the SMART data is generally not available to the OS.

Some RAID cards (usually higher-end enterprise level) support monitoring of the SMART data through their own drivers/management interfaces.

 

[swayzak]

Damn - that's the impression I was coming to...

The problem I have is that, for some strange reason, this board seems to only allow SATA drives via the Promise RAID/SATA controller chip BIOS , not just as SATA drives.

Therefore I have set them each as 1+0 RAID array - this way they both show up correctly as 500GB drives & I have copied over ghosted OS partitions & data partitions from my PATA drives. These work OK.

If this really is the case with this mboard (and I'm not being thick) then I can't see away of monitoring them for impending failure / high temps etc.

 

[gent]

When Windows is accessing a RAID (or potential RAID) drive it only sees the logical drive not the physical drive(s); how can it report the SMART data when it could be accessing one, two, or or more physical drives?

 

[Codesmith]

Sometimes the RAID management software can be set to check smart status at regular intervals. I know this is true of the NF4 RAID software.

Google released a hard drive failure study showing that SMART isn't very effective. Most drives are going to fail without warning.