June 10, 2010 12:00 AM PDT
by Dong Ngo
The Acronis Drive Monitor's interface is easy to use.
(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)
Most of the time, a hard drive goes bad without any warning. By the time you know that it's dead, it's already too late.
However, most modern hard drives have an early warning mechanism called self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology, or SMART, which gives you an early warning for when you need to replace the hard drive before it actually fails. The problem is that most of the time, you only get this warning when the computer boots up, so for computers that are kept on for a long period of time, such as servers, you'll need a real-time monitoring solution.
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