S.M.A.R.T. is short for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology for computer hard disks.  As a Windows Home Server is, well, a server, the drives inside one are the most important single entity of a WHS.  The problem is: how does one determine the S.M.A.R.T. health status of a WHS hard disk?

The answer to that question is this add-in called Home Server SMART.  A WHS utility that should have been part of the WHS add-in arsenal quite some time ago.

Installing the add-in is as simple as any other add-in.  Copy the msi installer to your D:SoftwareAdd-ins folder, open the WHS Setting Window in the console and install the software from the Add-ins tab, as shown below.

Reopen the WHS console, locate and click on the Home Server SMART tab.  At first, there is nothing to see other than a listing of the drives in your system.

Simply highlight a drive to get a listing of the drive information and S.M.A.R.T. details

Once you have highlighted a drive, you may then click on the SMART Status option along the top of  the window.  The following shows a drive with Warning status.

A drive with a Healthy status.

A drive with a Critical status.  Me thinks I need to keep a close eye on this drive!

Clicking on the Quick Help option brings up general program help and SMART information.

Finally, clicking on Refresh Disks will simply refresh the attached disk drives and associated information screens.

That’s all there is to the program.  Nothing more and nothing less is needed for this program, with the possible exception of a continuous monitoring/alert option if something starts going bad.

There is one other item that needs verification.  Is the reported information correct/accurate?  I went to my favorite benchmark website, Passmark Software, and downloaded their DiskCheckup software, which uses the same SMART information as Home Server SMART.

I installed it, opened it,

and checked the data from one program to the other.

Everything that I saw seemed to agree, which gives me that warm comfy feeling that comes from verification.  The last picture gives you an idea of what each SMART item represents, which is basically a duplicate of the Home Server SMART help file info.

The dividing line between one program and another is the interpretation of the Reallocated Sector Count.  While Home Server SMART interpreted the raw data of my 4th drives as critical, DiskCheckup did not.  I tend to agree that 53 reallocated sectors is probably not a good thing.

My verdict of Home Server SMART?  Highly recommended!  As I indicated above, a continuous monitoring/alert option would be a nice program enhancement.

Developer: Dojo North Software

Version Reviewed: 1.0.1.21

Release: 21Jan2010

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