What is S.M.A.R.T

[Aadi]

I just bought a new SSD from Kingston (Kingston HyperX 3k 120gb). I bought it to upgrade my old laptop's HDD which is starting to fail. I was looking on their website to see all the features and I noticed something called S.M.A.R.T? What exactly are the benefits of S.M.A.R.T? Can anyone explain?

[TheSLSAMG]

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T

 

Basically, it tells you the condition of your HDD/SSD and whether it is going to fail or not.

[tonychau77]

SSDs will remap bad flash blocks to extra flash blocks if it fails. Eventually you will run out of flash blocks and all your data will be gone forever. S.M.A.R.T is used for monitoring that and remind you to replace the drive before it fails. It is used on both HDDs and SSDs.

[Aadi]

Dooes it require 3rd party software?

[tonychau77]

Dooes it require 3rd party software?

Yes. You can use this. Install and run it. Select the drive, go to Device -> VIew details -> Attributes.

For more details, read this.

[Trophywolfe]

C.R.E.A.M.

[Blake]

Dooes it require 3rd party software?

Not always, a lot of BIOSs will show you the smart status of every HDD/SSD when they are initialising the storage controllers, otherwise follow tonychau77's sugestion and download that thingy.