I am not able to retrive SMART information from any drives

AC73 · 24 Jul 2010

Hi all. Yesterday I started hearing some clicks from one of my hard drives, so I installed DiskCheckup to get some SMART info and I get a message that says "No SMART compatible drives detected"! Well as you can see from my system specs, all my drives are indeed SMART compatible.
I also installed HDTune and HDD Health and both of those programs are not displaying SMART info as well. I ran all of the disk software as administrator to no avail. SMART Monitoring is also enabled in the BIOS. My motherboard drivers are up to date also.
I would like to find out which drive is on the way out without having to disconnect all the drives (save the system drive) and reconnecting one at a time just to listen and hope I hear the clicking sounds. The sounds don't happen constantly, just periodically and at random. However it has increased slightly in frequency and of course will only get worse, but you all know this already I'm sure.

This is also from a generated system health report:

SMART Disk Status Top: of 1

Query Query Result
root\wmi:SELECT * FROM MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus WHERE PredictFailure = true

Can somebody tell me what this message actually means?

So finally, why is the SMART information not being collected or detected at all?

Petey7 · 24 Jul 2010

You can try the WD diagnostics test on the WD drives, and the Samsung test for the Samsung drives. I'll provide the links. Just click download on the WD one.

WD Support > Downloads > SATA & SAS > WD VelociRaptor

http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...til210_FDD.zip

rontokyo · 24 Jul 2010

HDD Health doesn't recognize my drives either. Try Active@ Hard Disk Monitor -- recognizes my drives and provides heap loads of information. And it's free.

Bill2 · 24 Jul 2010

Just to answer the first question, what you see in the system generated health report is a WMI query (if you know SQL, you'll see the language similarity) for hard disk smart status. I checked on my own machine and the query result is 0x0. The "Top 1 of 1" is simply the number of returned results.

I'm not an expert on interpreting perfmon reports, that result could mean either that failure is not predicted, or that smart info could not be retreived. But, on scrolling up, under "Basic checks"=>"Test groups", there is an entry called "Smart Predict Failure Check" and against that is the "Description" whose value is "Passed". So looks like all is well. I also checked with Diskcheckup and it shows the smart info.

The query run by System health can also be run in Powershell like this:

Get-WmiObject -namespace "root/wmi" MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus

I'll do some research on this subject and see if I can find something interesting. Unfortunately, WMI capabilities are not very well documented or easy to understand.

hoganth · 24 Jul 2010

AC73 said:

Hi all. Yesterday I started hearing some clicks from one of my hard drives, so I installed DiskCheckup to get some SMART info and I get a message that says "No SMART compatible drives detected"! Well as you can see from my system specs, all my drives are indeed SMART compatible.
I also installed HDTune and HDD Health and both of those programs are not displaying SMART info as well. I ran all of the disk software as administrator to no avail. SMART Monitoring is also enabled in the BIOS. My motherboard drivers are up to date also.
I would like to find out which drive is on the way out without having to disconnect all the drives (save the system drive) and reconnecting one at a time just to listen and hope I hear the clicking sounds. The sounds don't happen constantly, just periodically and at random. However it has increased slightly in frequency and of course will only get worse, but you all know this already I'm sure.

This is also from a generated system health report:

SMART Disk Status Top: of 1

Query Query Result
root\wmi:SELECT * FROM MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus WHERE PredictFailure = true

Can somebody tell me what this message actually means?

So finally, why is the SMART information not being collected or detected at all?

Check your BIOS and make sure "Smart" is enabled for your drives

AC73 · 24 Jul 2010

Hello everyone, thanks for the replies. Shortly after I made this thread I came across
another program called CrystalDiskInfo (freeware) and it worked fine. Although its said that there's nothing wrong with any of the drives. I don't think any software can tell you if there is any physical damage to a drive though, eg motor ware and tare and the like. So I guess that I'm just going to have to check them one by one.

I think in the end I will grab a another HDD dock and ditch two of the F1's inside the computer. Having this much active storage is really too much. Two of the drives just sit there running all day long but don't do anything anyhow until I copy things over from the "work" drive I call it. I have an eSATA controller card with hot swap so I guess I will start utilizing it more. I have many HDD's I thought having as many inside the computer running, I wouldn't have to keep swapping drives in the dock so often. However since these drives have only been used for about 3500 hrs and I'm getting a failure already, there's no need to have them running needlessly.

Petey7 Thank you for the links, I will be using these periodically from now on.

rontokyo Thanks for this. It looks like a really good program. Cheap too!

Bill2 Thanks a lot for your efforts! No need for further research though. I appreciate your time. Although maybe someone else would like to know.

hoganth SMART is enabled in the BIOS. I did mention that in my original post. :) Thank you for your response.

Peace everyone.