Hardware Monitoring in Vista | The Coffeehouse

MarkPerris

I remember reading somewhere that Vista would support hardware monitoring, and would be able to predict, to some extent, hard disk failures and so on (presumably via S.M.A.R.T.)

Does anyone have any more information about this?

littleguru
<3 Seattle

They were saying something about that in the Vista videos here on Channel9. You should watch a few of them...

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=14&TagID=9

They even said that Vista is getting better the longer it is installed. I can't believe that!

MarkPerris

I have watched about 90% of those videos, but they contain no information on the subject of hardware monitoring. Unless anyone can point out a clip that does.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

I'm sorry I thought they were talking about that in one of the clips.

Manip

I'd love some advanced warning of a hard disk crash; but they can crash in *so* many ways I can't see it happening... I mean a head failure is just instananious... It literally JUST happens... As is the electronics getting knocked out.

MarkPerris

Those kind of catastrophic failures are unstoppable, but usually occur in laptops, which are much more likely to be subject to shocks when running. Many failures ( i think somewhere near 60% ) can be predicted with careful monitoring of the drive's performance parameters over time, that's why most servers run S.M.A.R.T monitoring software, which read very low level data such as spin up times, power on hours, and so on.

I'm certain heard somewhere that Vista would support hardware monitoring, and that would include forewarning, where possible, of drive failure.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In a few years time, I may replace my magnetic media with solid-state hard-drives, they've dropped in price a lot recently and with huge capacities as well.

Manip

W3bbo wrote:
In a few years time, I may replace my magnetic media with solid-state hard-drives, they've dropped in price a lot recently and with huge capacities as well.

I wouldn't count my chickens just yet... No solid state solution has shown it is able to match the r/w cycles of its magnetic counterpart... Even if they are getting 'better' they are still SO expensive that I think we are more likely to see hybrid drives (perhaps using flash memory cards) before we have full disks. If I had to throw out a figure I'd say 2009/10 for full drives.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

I read that they're about $25 a gigabyte for a 160GB drive.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

MarkPerris wrote:
Those kind of catastrophic failures are unstoppable, but usually occur in laptops, which are much more likely to be subject to shocks when running. Many failures ( i think somewhere near 60% ) can be predicted with careful monitoring of the drive's performance parameters over time, that's why most servers run S.M.A.R.T monitoring software, which read very low level data such as spin up times, power on hours, and so on.

I'm certain heard somewhere that Vista would support hardware monitoring, and that would include forewarning, where possible, of drive failure.

It happened to me once. All of the sudden, my PC's BIOS came up with a message "WARNING: S.M.A.R.T. failure predicted. Back up critical data and replace the disk." or something along those lines. After about a month of just ignoring the message (having made backups of course) I had finally gotten a replacement disk, and just as I was about to install it, the message disappeared.

Now, four years later, the disk still works, and the message never returned.

So excuse me if I don't have so much faith in S.M.A.R.T.'s ability to predict disk failures anymore. Tongue Out

MarkPerris

Sven Groot wrote:

It happened to me once. All of the sudden, my PC's BIOS came up with a message "WARNING: S.M.A.R.T. failure predicted. Back up critical data and replace the disk." or something along those lines. After about a month of just ignoring the message (having made backups of course) I had finally gotten a replacement disk, and just as I was about to install it, the message disappeared.

Now, four years later, the disk still works, and the message never returned.

So excuse me if I don't have so much faith in S.M.A.R.T.'s ability to predict disk failures anymore.

It's difficult to understand how the BIOS can predict anything from the SMART data except the most basic of guesses based on thresholds. One of the big ideas of SMART monitoring was that in order for a reasonably acurate prediction to be made, monitoring had to happen over a period of time, and i very much doubt that the BIOS can perform time-based monitoring. Furthermore, even when interpreted correctly, SMART isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than nothing at all.