During the past years, the new, advanced technology of SMART has been introduced in the hard disk drives. The SMART stands for “Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology”. There are many benefits of the SMART technology. With the help of the SMART technology, the user is given a warning about the hard disk drive incase of imminent failure. In this way the user can change the hard disk drive before its failure.
The HP also has introduced the “SMART technology” in their hard disk drives. The SMART technology checks the key parameters of the hp hard disc drive, and gives message to the user in case if there is any problem in the hard disk drive. The performance of the hard disk drive is not affected during the monitoring process of the SMART technology. In case if any type of error is detected by the “SMART technology”, then an immediate message displays on the screen of the user.
The SMART technology has three versions “SMART”, “SMART-II” and “SMART-III”. In the year 1995, the SMART was developed by Compaq. During the drive activity of the hard disk drive, the SMART monitors and keeps eye on the major attributes and the key parameters of the hard disk drive. The “Client Management” or the Basic input output system (BIOS) gives warning message to the user incase the key parameters cross the limits that are defined.
The SMART-II makes the SMART technology more reliable. With the help of SMART-II, the SMART technology uses the offline data. So, the SMART technology can determine the health of the hard disk drive during the time when the hard drive is inactive. Both the SMART-1 and SMART-2 are supported by the SMART-III. By using the SMART-III, the SMART technology completes the “media self scan”. The latest feature has been added to the SMART-III that enforces the coverage. This enforcement is made even when the drive’s usage cycle is under heavy duty.
The SMART performs the job well of detecting the errors and identifying the errors to the user that affect the performance of the hard disk drive. The HP hard disk drives have the technology that helps the smooth flow of the data between the “Host interface” and the “Media”. Therefore, the HP Hewlett-Packard hard drives are more reliable and robust. In every block of 512bytes that are in “data-path” of the “cache Random Access Memory” of HP hard disk drive is added a parity-code. This is done to make sure that the data between the host and the media is moved swiftly.
When the disc is being read, after the transfer of data from the disc it generates a parity-code of two byte. The parity-data is again monitored when it is moved to interface of the hard drive from data-buffer. When the data is written onto the hard disk, the SMART 4 generates a parity-code of two bytes. Before the data moves into the buffer, this parity-code of two bytes attached to the data. Before the writing and transfer of the data to the data buffer, the SMART-4 checks the parity-code. A protocol of the HP hard disk notifies the Operating System of the host if an error occurs during the movement of the data. It is up to the operating system of the host to take action either by resending the command or to send message to the user about the error in the data. The Hewlett-Packard Binary input output system (BIOS) can also send the failure message when the system is rebooted next time. There is no need to install any additional softwares because the BIOS of the HP can handle the status commands of the SMART technology.