Re: A Handy Trick
 

"nemo_outis" <abc@xyz.com> wrote in
news:Xns9B83783EDB4F8pqwertyu@69.16.185.250:

Two afterthoughts:

While there are many slick GUI-based programs out there for reading SMART
values I prefer a rather geeky one which provides the best fine-grained
reading and *control* - smartctl. Runs on Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Cygwin, QNX, eComStation or Windows. Free
too!

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

As for most hard drives not responding to the "disable SMART" commands,
this is hardly surprising (but very welcome for security/privacy). If it
could be turned off easily it could lead to all sorts of warranty headaches
for manufacturers (e.g., someone could misrepresent a heeavy-use failure as
an "infant death" one, etc.)

Regards,

PS Smartctl is well worth experimenting with for the
diagnostic/predictive/testing aspects of SMART as well as the security use
I described earlier.