GSmartControl 0.8.6-2

GSmartControl - A tool for querying and controlling SMART data on modern hard disk drives.

A tool for querying and controlling SMART data on modern hard disk drives.

The GSmartControl application was designed to be a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

What is SMART?
Short answer: SMART is a technology which provides hard disk drives with methods to predict certain kinds of failures with certain chance of success.

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART, is a monitoring system for hard drives to detect and report various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. It is implemented inside the drives SMART provides several ways of monitoring hard drive health. It may provide information about general health, various drive attributes (for example, number of unreadable sectors), error logs, and so on. It may also provide ways to instruct the drive to run various self-tests, which may report valuable information. It may even automatically scan the disk surface in when the drive is idle, and repair the defects, reallocating the data to more safe areas.

At present SMART is implemented individually by manufacturers, and while some aspects are standardized for compatibility, others are not. In fact, most manufacturers refer the users to their own health monitoring utilities, and advice against taking SMART data seriously. Nevertheless, SMART may prove an effective measure against data loss.

Yet another issue is that quite often the drives have bugs which prevent correct SMART usage. This is usually due to buggy firmware, or the manufacturer ignoring the standard. Luckily, smartmontools usually detects these bugs and works around them.

GSmartControl features :

- automatically reports and highlights any anomalies;
- allows enabling/disabling SMART;
- allows enabling/disabling Automatic Offline Data Collection - a short self-check that the drive will perform automatically every four hours with no impact on performance;
- supports configuration of global and per-drive options for smartctl;
- performs SMART self-tests;
- displays drive identity information, capabilities, attributes, and self-test/error logs;
- can read in smartctl output from a saved file, interpreting it as a read-only virtual device;
- works on most smartctl-supported operating systems;
- has extensive help information.

GSmartControl 0.8.6-2 is licensed as Freeware for the Windows operating system / platform. GSmartControl is provided as a free download for all software users (Freeware).