Loss of SMART

[Robin Bignall]

Another weird thing I've noticed: my drives seem to have lost their
SMART capability. They certainly had it when I first installed W7 and
Speedfan. Now SF can only 'see' disk 3 and Perfect Disk Pro can't see
any of them. There's nothing in the BIOS, and some Gigabyte users
who've recommended ctrl-F1 to enter advanced BIOS will find it does
nothing on my M/B.

 

[Paul]

Another weird thing I've noticed: my drives seem to have lost their
SMART capability. They certainly had it when I first installed W7 and
Speedfan. Now SF can only 'see' disk 3 and Perfect Disk Pro can't see
any of them. There's nothing in the BIOS, and some Gigabyte users
who've recommended ctrl-F1 to enter advanced BIOS will find it does
nothing on my M/B.

The BIOS has a SMART setting, but that would be for BIOS monitoring
of SMART. I've never seen the BIOS make any response to my disks, so
I can't say how it would manifest, and at what point in time the BIOS
could do something. I don't think that has any effect on the operating
system.

SMART while the OS is running, is a function of the command set on the
disk interface. If the interface is IDE or SATA, chances are the OS
can query the devices (Compatible/Enhanced IDE mode for IDE or SATA
drives).

If the driver type is pseudo-SCSI (such as a RAID controller), it's
possible the SMART command set is missing from there. SMART goes
missing, any time the interface isn't "SMART transparent". I only
use IDE mode (in the BIOS) on my Southbridges here, and have never
had a problem getting SMART info with tools in Windows.

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

"Even with a hard drive and interface that implements the specification,
the computer's operating system may not see the S.M.A.R.T. information
because the drive and interface are encapsulated in a lower layer. For
example, they may be part of a RAID subsystem in which the RAID controller
sees the S.M.A.R.T.-capable drive, but the main computer sees only a
logical volume generated by the RAID controller."

HTH,
Paul

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Another weird thing I've noticed: my drives seem to have lost their
SMART capability. They certainly had it when I first installed W7 and
Speedfan. Now SF can only 'see' disk 3 and Perfect Disk Pro can't see
any of them. There's nothing in the BIOS, and some Gigabyte users
who've recommended ctrl-F1 to enter advanced BIOS will find it does
nothing on my M/B.

Try Hard Disk Sentinel or Crystal Disk Info.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Robin Bignall]

The BIOS has a SMART setting, but that would be for BIOS monitoring
of SMART. I've never seen the BIOS make any response to my disks, so
I can't say how it would manifest, and at what point in time the BIOS
could do something. I don't think that has any effect on the operating
system.

There's no mention of SMART in BIOS.

SMART while the OS is running, is a function of the command set on the
disk interface. If the interface is IDE or SATA, chances are the OS
can query the devices (Compatible/Enhanced IDE mode for IDE or SATA
drives).

If the driver type is pseudo-SCSI (such as a RAID controller), it's
possible the SMART command set is missing from there. SMART goes
missing, any time the interface isn't "SMART transparent". I only
use IDE mode (in the BIOS) on my Southbridges here, and have never
had a problem getting SMART info with tools in Windows.

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

"Even with a hard drive and interface that implements the specification,
the computer's operating system may not see the S.M.A.R.T. information
because the drive and interface are encapsulated in a lower layer. For
example, they may be part of a RAID subsystem in which the RAID controller
sees the S.M.A.R.T.-capable drive, but the main computer sees only a
logical volume generated by the RAID controller."

Again Paul, thank you. I have my serial ATA disks set to AHCI, which is
a sort of RAID without raiding, I suppose. Again, this is BIOS optimum.
I'll try setting them back to IDE.

 

[Robin Bignall]

Again Paul, thank you. I have my serial ATA disks set to AHCI, which is
a sort of RAID without raiding, I suppose. Again, this is BIOS optimum.
I'll try setting them back to IDE.

Well, that fixed the SMART problem.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Well, that fixed the SMART problem.

I'm running AHCI drivers here too, and I have no problem obtaining SMART
info from any of my disks.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Robin Bignall]

I'm running AHCI drivers here too, and I have no problem obtaining SMART
info from any of my disks.

Strange. With IDE (whose performance for what I do seems identical to
AHCI), Speed fan 4.46 can see SMART for all of my four drives, but
Perfect Disk can see it for only two of them. With AHCI Speed fan can
only see one (they're all SATA) and PD sees them all as RAID, with no
SMART.