User Guide
4
Introduction
What is SMART-ER?
SMART-ER (SMART-Error Reporting) is a utility that monitors the health
of your hard drive and can provide timely information that may help you
avoid losing your valuable data due to drive failure. The Apricorn SMART-
ER utility periodically monitors the health status of a system’s internal
hard drive. This system utility taps into the information provided by the
S.M.A.R.T capabilities built into all modern IDE hard drives. The Apricorn
SMART-ER utility is designed as a natural extension of the operating
system. It installs itself as a System Tray icon (on the task bar, lower right,
next to the time) and will monitor each drive’s SMART health status and
each volume’s free space at periodic intervals. If a drive’s health status
changes, the user is instantly notied. Optionally, an E-mail alert can be
sent to a designated support person. This allows the corrective action
before the drive actually starts to fail, although it should be noted that
S.M.A.R.T cannot predict ALL drive failures. The only fail-safe way to
protect against data loss from a catastrophic drive failure is to implement a
regular backup plan. Check out Apricorn’s website (www.apricorn.com) for
our “EZ” to use backup utility.
What is S.M.A.R.T.?
S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology
and was developed to give hard drive users an advance warning about
possible future failures. S.M.A.R.T. monitors many aspects of a drive’s
health status, including spin-up time, spindle speed variance, seek errors
and reallocated sectors. Each drive manufacturer sets thresholds for
each of these parameters. When one of these parameters is exceeded, a
S.M.A.R.T. status error is reported.
System Requirements
Hardware Requires an IDE, Ultra ATA or SATA hard drives
that utilize S.M.A.R.T. technology
Operating Systems Supports Vista/XP/2003/2000/NT for Limited
Users or Administrators