self monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (SMART)

Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART or S.M.A.R.T.) is an industry standard for system monitoringand hard drive failure prediction. In system monitoring, sensors located on the motherboard monitor temperature, fan speed and operating voltage and report critical conditions that are automatically corrected. In addition, SMART collects data on hard drive uptime, number of start-stop cycles, read error rate and more.

For hard disk drives, SMART uses performance analysis to determine the performance of hard disks and RAID arrays. With SMART, the performance values of hard disks and their changes can be monitored on the basis of defined parameters. By exceeding set thresholds, SMART signals a performance drop in hard drives to the administrator. Typical characteristics of hard disks include headroom, data throughput, start-up time, seek error rate and seek time. Because SMART can transmit alarm messages via email or Simple Network Management Protocol( SNMP), these messages can be incorporated into network management.

SMART has been prepared for standardization by the Small Form Factor Committee( SFF).