I don't think I have seen this anywhere yet, but I'd like to request S.M.A.R.T. monitoring to be added, to possibly help indicate any possible hard drive problems. Idealially it would spit a message on screen if something serious happened, or an alert could be displayed in emplode on a sync attempt.

(ah ha, I think I finally thought of one that Tony can't respond with 1.1 as the answer )

Just to add to this, http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/smart.shtml has a S.M.A.R.T. monitoring package for Linux, as well as links to other information. I'll look into adding this for now as a hack.

sorry for raising the dead, did this ever get implemented? can someone compile it to ARM? my friend's hard drive recently crashed w/o a backup, and it would give me peace of mind that my mp3s are safe on the empeg.

Most of this could be done with a shell script, since the SMART values and thresholds are available through my /proc/ide/hd?/smart_* interface.

Apart from the shell script, one needs to have the kernel (Hijack?) issue the command to the drive to tell it to turn on SMART monitoring internally.

Easy stuff.

Apparently, the reason SMART never caught on is because it doesn't end up helping much. It was discovered after it was implemented that most hard drive failures are sudden, with no particular warning. (This is all based on hearsay and reports, however.)

Which is not to say that it's useless, but it's hardly the panacea that it seems like it ought to be.

Every prebuilt system I've come across in the last few years has actually had SMART monitoring turned off in the BIOS.
The only time I've ever even see a warning about the SMART values exceeding the preset thresholds was in a laptop. The HD was on the way out as the laptop had been subjected to quite a few knocks and had been dropped a few times whilst it was on.

- Trevor

About the only really useful measure I know of from SMART would be the drive temperature, available as a "vendor-specific" field in some drives from IBM, and possibly others.

-ml

i've actually come across some dell machines that has SMART monitoring software pre-loaded. happened to get warnings one. the three days later, the hdd crashed on it.

the next time another computer gave a warning, i reacted quickly, and ghosted the drive. turns out that it caught one sector that became corrupt.

In reply to:

---

i've actually come across some dell machines that has SMART monitoring software pre-loaded. happened to get warnings one. the three days later, the hdd crashed on it.

---

The one time I tried to use a SMART monitoring program, my HD crashed, and I had to reload everything anyways. (No joke!)

Me.

Not much of an early warning system then!

"SMART thresholds exceeded. Your HD is going to crash in 1 second. Please backup everything NOW! Too late..."

- Trevor