can't enable SMART

[Mr_Flibbles]

Hi all,

SMART's not enabled on any of my three hard drives (indicated before XP splash screen), and I don't see any way to turn it on in my BIOS. Is there another route I can take to enable it?

Thanks!
Trevor

Specs:

GA-7VT600 1394 mobo (Award Bios, version 6.00)
2x WD800JB HDDs
1x 160GB Maxtor

1700+ Athlon XP
2x256MB PC2100 RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9200
Antec 350w PSU

 

[avidday]

The only possible way is to turn it on in the BIOS

Totally untrue. SMART is 100% controlled via standard commands on the IDE bus - even user space applications can turn SMART on or off with the OS running. SMART configuration and log data is stored on each HDD (normally in a combination of flash memory on the HDD's internal controller and some reserved areas of the HDD itself) and is completely independent of the PC BIOS. Some PC BIOS's do include facilities to interrogate and manipulate SMART, but they are only doing what any simple user space tool can do,and to suggest that <b>only</b> the BIOS can change SMART settings is completely wrong. IIRC Seagate even have an ActiveX plugin that can turn on, interogate and run tests on Seagate SMART drives - all from inside Internet Explorer!

The simplest way to turn SMART on is to grab the boot disk utility most HDD manufacturers make for their drives (IBM/Hitachi drive fitness, Seagate SeaTools etc) and turn it with that. Another alternative is to boot a live linux CD like Knoppix and use the Smartmontools user space package to enable it.

The only caveat about SMART is if you have an older Samsung drive - they report their status words byte swapped compared with everyone else and whatever tool you use needs to be aware of that and change the endianess of the output, otherwise it will report all sorts of nonsensical SMART diagnostics for your drive.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by avidday on 05/13/05 03:31 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[avidday]

Even with SMART turned on at the disk side it still needs to go through the IDE controller before you can actually uses it hence my above statement was correct.

SMART control commands are simple, atomic ATAPI commands which are an integral part of the ATA/IDE standard command set and have been since about 1996. All modern ATA controllers that support the full ATA/6 standard or newer natively support SMART without doing anything - it is a built in feature of the controller and drive command set. Don't believe me?, then read relevent sections of the ATA/6 standard <A HREF="http://www.t13.org/docs2002/d1410r3b.pdf" target="_new">here</A>. To make SMART work all you have to do is tell the drive to enable smart and issue it with whatever commands you desire to enable or run self tests or retrieve the test results or drive status. That requires no special controls or configuration of the ATA controller.

The majority PC BIOS's are totally ignorant of SMART because they can be - some provide hooks and controls for BIOS level monitoring of hard drives via SMART (ie. the BIOS can initiate short self tests on the HDD during POST). That is completely different to host OS or user space utility monitoring of HDD via SMART. I use smart on all of my PC's - some of them have BIOS level SMART monitors and I <b>disable</b> it on all of them and use userspace tools. It works exactly as it should.

To suggest that SMART is somehow intrinsically tied to BIOS functionally in some way is 100% incorrect.

 

[avidday]

Then you can tell me how I can bring back SMART with any el-cheap IDE RAID card?
It's something I sacraficed when I went with HPT370 for RAID. (Same for HPT372)

So now you would like to completely change the subject and talk about IDE RAID controllers and SMART? I don't recall anybody mentioning RAID up until now, and if you have been talking about a RAID controller all along then I understand your confusion, but anyway....

Firstly, a hardware IDE raid controller is not a host ATA controller. The host PCI bus and the OS managing it don't see a standard host IDE controller offering individually connected drives. Instead there is a "pseudo" ATA host controller offering only a single device (ATAPI or native ATA depending on the implementation) which suports a very limited subset of the full ATA command set. There is then an additional device or set of non standard ATA commands (again implementation specific) over which the RAID controller can communicate additional information about the disk array status and allow configuration of the disk array. The driver, management utilities and/or BIOS use this to manage the array. Many RAID controllers do support SMART <b>internally</b>, that is to say the RAID contoller will monitor the state of the drives via SMART and will run self tests, report errors and disk state information via the controller's event logging or diagnostic facility (again implementation specific). User space SMART tools <b>will not work</b> because they cannot "see" each individual drive in the array, but SMART is still active on each drive in the array and the RAID controller is managing the array accordingly. I might be wrong, but I think that HighPoint's controllers do work this way, although I have no personal experience with them.

Some IDE raid controllers go a step further than that. I have a 3ware Escalade 7506 based PATA RAID card which provides a ATAPI device for each physically connected drive in addition to the primary raid device. These devices allow userspace SMART tools to execute SMART commands on each attached drive exactly as if they were connected to a conventional ATA host controller and not a RAID controller. Their driver even allows for a http daemon to provide web based SMART administration of each drive on the array.

All of what I have just said isn't just restricted to IDE drives, SCSI and SMART is essentially identical in implementation and operation.

The bottom line of all of this is that using SMART on drives connected to a hardware RAID controller clearly isn't the same as simply connected ATA or SCSI drives on a standard host controller. Two completely different situations.