SMART: The Drive Health Status or «How are my Hard Drives Doing?

Defective HDD or SSD drives can lead to the loss of important data - especially with insufficient backup.

To detect the risk of drive failure early, S.M.A.R.T was developed and introduced several years ago. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and means that a hard drive can monitor itself, analyze and report the results to the operating system or a program.

With SMART, each drive is assigned a score that is composed of various parameters. These parameters include the number of read and write errors, the temperature and the time the hard drive needs until ready, as well as the number of hours it has been in operation. Many more parameters are added here to evaluate the "fitness" of the hard drive. Thanks to the continuous monitoring of these values, a failure can be predicted with very high probability, because a hard drive almost never just fails without warning. In most cases, this is preceded by an accumulation of read errors, slower throughput rates and often also increased temperature in the housing.

Most hard drives support the SMART standard and it can be queried through various methods.

Is there a way to detect early if a drive is about to fail?

Yes, there is now this possibility: the Cyber Protect Drive Integrity Status.

The Cyber Protect Drive Integrity Status measures based on certain data points, the SMART parameters, whether your drives are generating read and write errors and at what intervals these errors occur. Based on this data, the current integrity of your drives is checked and you are warned of possible failures before they occur.

The Drive Integrity Prediction helps you replace hard drives before they fail and data is lost. This functionality is currently available for physical Windows computers. Both HDD (classic hard drives) and SSD (flash memory-based drives) are supported.

The Drive Integrity Status is part of our Cyber Protect solution and can be added to any of our Server and Workstation backup packages. Creating a backup is not necessary to receive information about drive integrity. The installation of the Cyber Protect Agent on the computer to be monitored is required.

Are you interested in this solution?

Let us know and contact us without obligation: kontakt@backup.ch