Hard drives, like most machines, have a limited lifespan and with most drives, it's merely a question of when they will fail. But determining exactly when a failure will occur is difficult, if not impossible. Yet, there are utilities that can monitor a drive's condition and help you preempt a catastrophic drive failure by replacing the drive before it dies. One such utility for IBM and Hitachi hard drives is SMARTDefender from Kroll Ontrack. This free utility is a replacement for IBM's old EZSMART tool and is available for download from Hitachi's Web site. (IBM sold its hard drive division to Hitachi in 2003 and together they created Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which is owned 70 percent by Hitachi and 30 percent by IBM.) SMARTDefender runs under Windows and can monitor SMART-capable IDE and SCSI hard drives. It doesn't, however, support RAID controllers (e.g., ATA or SCSI), including JBOD configurations, and won't detect RAID drives. What is SMART?
SMART stands for self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology. It's a standard for predicting the likelihood of impending failure for a hard disk. The software originated at Western Digital and was later integrated into the ATA standard. You enable SMART support in the system BIOS. It's used by drives of the ATA-3 standard and above. SMART checks a drive and establishes a threshold for its performance in several areas. It can then notify the user when any of those measurements falls below the performance threshold, possibly signalling an impending drive failure. Some of the factors it checks are head floating height, data throughput performance, spin-up time, seek error rate, seek time performance, and drive calibration retry count. Using SMARTDefender
The SMARTDefender download is less than 2MB, and the installation process is extremely straightforward. After installing SMARTDefender, the SMARTDefender Monitor icon, a red shield, will appear in your system tray, letting you know that the SMART Defender is monitoring your system. Instead of just leaving SMARTDefender's operation to chance, however, I recommend initially performing a manual test and then adjusting the SMARTDefender settings for future tests. Running manual self-tests and checking capacity information
To manually run a test, double-click on the SMARTDefender icon or right-click and select Run | SmartDefender. Doing either will display the main SMART Defender screen. Click SMARTTests to select the type of test you want to run and the drive you want to test. There are three different tests available, as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

SMARTDefender includes three different types of tests.