However, unless the third-party software vendor consults with the drive vendor on correct SMART attributes, their definitions and thresholds (when applicable) are likely to mislabel the attributes and can lead to false-positive or false-negative failure reports. There are several third-party utilities that can retrieve and report a drive’s SMART data, often available in freeware and shareware. The attribute descriptors will vary between SSD and HDD, and even between the various SSD vendors. Unfortunately, regardless of the storage technology, there is no industry-wide standard to tell you which numbered SMART attribute describes a specific physical property of a drive.

SMART was originally implemented on HDDs and was adapted for SSDs when this new technology was invented as a drop-in replacement for spinning hard drives. SMART has been around for many years and predates the birth of the SSD.

The drive can only report if certain attributes have passed over pre-determined thresholds, and then only if thresholds have been programmed in firmware. SMART data can be a valuable tool, providing an early warning if a drive is having problems or has reached the end of its useful life, leading to the possibility of replacement before a failure.Įasy reporting to a user or system administrator is important because the drive itself is not capable of an in-depth analysis of the data. As the name suggests, it is a tool that records the health data of a hard drive disk (HDD) or a solid state drive (SSD). SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology.

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