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New WHS Add-in: Home Server SMART

By on January 23, 2010 in Add-ins & Apps, News, Software, Windows Home Server

Do you like to keep a close eye on your hard drives?  Look no further, because the add-in for you has just been released.

ApplicationMainWindow thumb New WHS Add in: Home Server SMART

Introducing

Home Server SMART

Home Server SMART is a Windows Home Server (WHS) add-in that enables you to monitor the health of most of your hard disks attached to WHS. Home Server SMART examines the S.M.A.R.T. data exposed by your disks and determines the health of the disk. If problems are detected, Home Server SMART informs you which attribute(s) are critical or problematic, and it presents a summary of problems found. If the problems are serious, Home Server SMART will make a recommendation to you that you replace the disk.

Disks that are connected via IDE (PATA) and SATA (including eSATA), support Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) and report that S.M.A.R.T. data via the standard Microsoft storage driver (most modern PATA/SATA drives do), are fully supported. Unfortunately, since neither USB nor IEEE 1394 (FireWire) attached disks report S.M.A.R.T. data in a standardized manner, Home Server SMART cannot read S.M.A.R.T. data from them. However, it can read the standard Microsoft storage driver “failure predicted” flag, and USB/IEEE 1394 expose this, so if the storage driver detects a potential problem, Home Server SMART will alert you to it.

Simply log into the WHS Console, select the Home Server SMART add-in and immediately see all installed/connected disks. Click on a disk to see more details about the disk.

I just installed this on an HP X510, and I was a bit chagrined to find out that 1 drive had 2 bad sectors and 1 drive had 53(!) bad sectors.

So, go get it, install it, check out your drives.  Hopefully, you will like what you see!

More Info: Home Server SMART


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About Jim Clark

Hello. I’m from the heartland of the U.S. Lots of corn and beans, although Iowa is a lot more than just farmland. It also has a few computer enthusiasts (no, not me!). I’ve been around PCs since I got my 1st PC XT aloooong time ago. WGS is one of the first sites I found centered around WHS. And the best. Every once in awhile, I do get away from the KB and enjoy time with and my wife and our 4 kids. And I do have a day job.
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  • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

    Excellent looking add-in, Disk Management watch your back.

  • Simon

    broken link?

  • browned
  • Mark

    Norton 2010 is reporting this download as having the Reser.Reputation.1 virus for some reason and keeps removing it after I have downloaded

  • dmills21

    Norton flagged this as a virus, Reser.Reputation.1….?? I'm going to say this is a false-positive, but FYI.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Clark Jim_Clark

    NOD32 had no problems with the download, FWIW

  • dressie

    Many new add-in this week! Would be cool if this one was combined with AdminiMe!

  • Rychek

    I am loving the information this add-in reveals. If the same information could be incorporated into Disk Management, it would be absolutely awesome.

  • walkabt

    Ditto on the virus issue, tried it with Norton IS 2010 on one machine and McAfee on another. Neither are showing it as safe.

  • snowdins

    Is this a false positive or should I not install this?

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Clark Jim_Clark

    I directly checked the file with NOD32 and Microsoft Security Essentials. Both said "no problem"

    The problem might be because the utility is accessing low-level HD functions, which might trigger certain AV solutions.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

    Avast shows it as fine.

  • fasthair

    Works ok here. MSE gave it a clean bill of health for me. Found one of my very old hard drives is starting to have issues. I've been wanting to get them out of the server since they are very old. How old? Maybe the size will give you a clue, 30GB IDE : ) Got a shiny new WD 1TB Green drive sitting here just waiting to go to work. So I guess I'll be ripping the cover off and installing new hardware. Yippee!!!____fasthair

  • http://twitter.com/olearypatrick @olearypatrick

    I've installed this. Yikes! Multiple drives with errors. Now that I know that, what now?

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

      Elaborate or open up a thread in the forum, somebody may be able to help ^_^

  • poundman

    I can't get it to work on my home built WHS. Maybe a motherboard issue. I get the message WMI worker process encountered and exception not supported. I think it is because I have ACHI enabled ? Should I disable.

    • http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net Matt Sawyer

      Hi poundman,

      Can you please elaborate more on your WHS build? I know that the OS is Server 2003, but there may be some problems within WMI that are giving the problem.

      Specifically, the following WMI methods are queried:
      Win32_DiskDrive
      MSStorageDriver_ATAPISmartData
      MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictThresholds
      MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus

      I tested the modules using a GUI wrapper in Windows 7 against an Intel controller that can function in both AHCI and AHCI/RAID modes, and it doesn't yield any trouble.

      If you can provide further info…perhaps visit http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/TBM/forum and post your question, along with some screen caps so I can debug this.

      Best regards,
      Matt

      • Matt Pietrek

        I'm getting the exact same error "WMI worker process encountered an exception: Not supported"

        This is a homebuilt box that seems to be running fine. I have PP3 installed, and am current with all updates.

        The other add-ins I have installed are Diskeeper WHS 2010, Wake On Lan, and SqueezeServer.

  • Marcel

    Nice add in i certainly try this one. Curious or my drives has errors.

  • Warp9

    This add-in looks very nice. Works very well on my HP EX470. I've got four SATA drives in it. Three have a clean bill of health, but one (my newest drive) has 5 "Pending Bad Sectors", but apparently that's not anything too terrible.

    I'd recommend this add-in for any WHS users who want to understand the health of their drives on a more detailed level.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/urmaster urmaster

    Link does not work BTW Jim

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/tezzer Terry Walsh

      Fixed. Points off the scorecard for Jim :-)

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Clark Jim_Clark

      That' was weird, but I guess it is Terry to the rescue! :)

  • http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net Matt Sawyer

    Hi,

    I'm Matt Sawyer, owner of Dojo North Software and developer of Home Server SMART. I apologize for the folks who are getting the Reser.Reputation.1 virus. I do not know why this is the case, but I too am able to reproduce it on my home PC, which is running NIS 2010.

    Interestingly, if I disable NIS temporarily, download the MSI, then re-enable NIS and scan the file, it comes back clean. So it looks like I will need to open a ticket with Symantec and have them investigate this.

    Continued in next post…

  • http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net Matt Sawyer

    I have another computer running Symantec Endpoint Protection enterprise, and another with McAfee 8.5.0i Enterprise, and both of them allow me to download the file without issue.

    My wife's laptop has NIS 2010, and the download is flagged in both Firefox and IE; again, if I suspend NIS, download, re-enable NIS and scan the file, it is okay.

    As a workaround, if you have NIS 2010, you can download the file and let it get detected. Then go into NIS Quarantine and choose the option to Restore the file. Once the file is restored, you can re-scan the file with NIS Insight and it should report the file as clean. Also, if you right-click the file and select Properties, it should be Digitally Signed by Dojo North Software, with a GoDaddy trusted root cert, and a countersignature (timestamp) of 1/21/2010 10:28:22 PM. Note that this is eastern standard time; the hour may vary depending on your timezone.

    Best regards,
    Matt

  • http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net Matt Sawyer

    I put the MSI into a zip file, and also included an Installation Instructions text file.

    I updated the website with the new files, and updated the download link. I downloaded the file to test, using NIS 2010, and it no longer complains about Reser.Reputation.1.

    1. I downloaded in IE 8.
    2. Chose Save…
    3. Saved the file.
    4. After the save completed, I chose "Open Folder."
    5. Right-click the file and select Norton Internet Security > Insight Network Scan.
    6. The file is scanned and found to be threat-free.

    Again I apologize for any inconvenience. If anyone still has trouble please let me know!

    Best regards,
    Matt

  • http://missingremote.com David

    Well I installed the Addin and my OS drive has like 5000 CRC errors.

    hopefully spinrite can fix them….. i hate the reinstall of WHS

  • Doru

    Hi Matt, just to confirm: you are not continuously querying the SMART data, right? The user needs to hit the refresh button for the add-in to go read the data again. Thanks

  • tman24

    This won't work with the (AMD) Southbridge chipset configured for SATA native mode (AHCI). SMART is blocked by the driver, so you won't see anything. Apparently WHS2 (Vail) will allow SMART over AHCI, but that's a way off.

    There's definately some benefits with AHCI (NCQ, hotplug etc), but I at least, don't get SMART info.