Tampilan awal daftar perangkat yang terdeteksi
Sebuah perangkat lunak yang dapat memantau berbagai parameter kesehatan hardisk,perangkat lunak ini terutama berguna untuk membaca nilai SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) dilengkapi dengan penjelasan apa makna masing-masing nilai tersebut, hal ini jarang dimiliki oleh perangkat lunak pembaca SMART lain.
Penjelasan dari situsnya sendiri:
GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from smartmontools package), 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.”
Kelebihan lain dari perangkat lunak sumber terbuka yang tersedia secara cuma-cuma ini adalah dapat digunakan pada berbagai sistem operasi baik windows,linux,bsd maupun macos bahkan terdapat pada beberapa live-cd seperti parted magic dan ultimatebootcd.
Berbagai fitur pada GSMARTControl
Tampilan nilai SMART di GSMARTControl pada Windows7
GSmartControl pada Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)
Parameter SMART yang diwarnai merah tersebut mengindikasikan sudah berada pada nilai berbahaya
Walaupun nilai SMART sendiri menurut penelitian Google tidak selalu dapat menunjukkan sebuah hardisk akan mengalami kegagalan fungsi,tetapi sampai saat ini belum tersedia cara lebih akurat yang dapat dijadikan acuan.Minimal dapat dijadikan indikasi utama menyiapkan langkah backup data maupun hardisk pengganti. Sebagaimana dikutip dari kesimpulan penelitian Google tersebut:
Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever. This result suggests that SMART models are more useful in predicting trends for large aggregate populations than for individual components. It also suggests that powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART
Sementara dari penjelasan pengembang GSMARTControl sendiri:
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.
Long answer: read below.
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.
While having SMART sounds really good, there are some nuances to consider. One of the common pitfalls is that it may create a false sense of security. That is, a perfectly good SMART data is NOT an indication that the drive won’t fail the next minute. The reverse is also true – some drives may function perfectly even with not-so-good-looking SMART data. However, as studies indicate, given a large population of drives, some SMART attributes may reliably predict drive failures within up to two months.
Another common mistake is to assume that the attribute values are the real physical values, as experienced by the drive. As manufacturers do not necessarily agree on precise attribute definitions and measurement units, the exact meaning of the attributes may vary greatly across different drive models.
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.
Saat ini GSMARTControl dengan pembaruan terakhir sudah mencapai versi 0.8.7
GSMARTControl dapat diunduh dari berlios.de
Pada Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) asal terhubung ke internet instalasi dapat menggunakan perintah:
$ sudo apt-get install gsmartcontrol