Hard drive protection

There are many different types of storage devices such as floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, memory cards or USB flash drivers . However, the most important computer is still the HDD hard drive. The bigger the hard drive, the bigger the capacity and the cheaper the price.

About 5 years ago, popular types of drives have capacities ranging from 1.2 GB to a maximum of 10 GB. Now hard drives have capacities of 40 GB, 80 GB, even hundreds of GB.

However, the priceless is the data contained in the hard disk. It is a disaster that a sudden "sudden" drive will not be able to back up the data. Therefore, please consider the health of this very important storage device to promptly respond.

Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) is a very important benchmark that requires manufacturers to integrate into the hard disk to bring confidence to consumers. malfunction). When detecting signs of damage near the specified threshold may cause the hard drive to stop working, this feature will give warnings to users. SMART is developed based on the Predictive Failure Analysis technique - PFA (predictive breakdown analysis) by IBM for Mainframe Computer (large computer used in military and industrial). The first company to study this technique for desktop computers is Compaq called Drive Failure Prediction (predicting problems for the drive). You should know that IBM has tested over 3 million different hard drives to be able to come up with standards for SMART

If you have enabled the SMART feature in the mainboard from BIOS setup, if the standard hard drive is broken, we can receive a message with the contents " HDD Bad, Backup and Replace ".

SMART technique

It contains about 35 different properties, which helps detect about 70% of hard drive errors. Report to users through the BIOS screen or through a diagnostic software. Each disc manufacturer integrates into its products with different characteristics. But the ultimate goal is to anticipate dangerous incidents that may occur, predicting almost exactly the time it takes for users to back up data in a timely manner. Some characteristics of hard disk manufacturers often integrate in SMART technology: recording hard disk temperature, hard disk rotation, rough error rate, counting start and stop times .

The diagnostic software

- HDD Health V 2.1: 879KB by Aleksey S Cherkasskiy, refer to and download from www.panterasoft.com. This software analyzes 15 specifications. Most importantly, when you click on the Health tab, if the Known Problems pane says: " There are no problems with this hard drive " is relatively reassuring. If you add the Overall health status frame as well as the Nearest TEC frame, it is labeled N / A, then your hard drive will definitely be very good, without worrying.

- D-Temp: 144KB of small capacity, free of charge, no installation required. Just click and it runs with a system tray icon that shows the current temperature of the hard disk. Download from http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/download.html.

- HDD Thermometer: Monitor the hard drive temperature, 213 KB capacity is a Free Software but not completely free, it requires us to register to use but not pay. If not registered, each time you run the program, you will encounter a Nag screen to remind you to register (Nag: nag, grumbling). Reliability when monitoring temperature is quite high. This program also displays the hard drive temperature in the system tray. By Georgy Koychev, download from www.rsdsoft.com.

Ta Xuan Quan