S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitoring in W2K

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben-Zion Joselson
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Ben-Zion Joselson

I have 3 SCSI hard disks controlled by Adaptec 29160LP
SCSI controller, and the Operating System is Windows 2000
Professional.

I want to ensure that Windows 2000 Professional native
monitoring, Event-reporting and alerting tools will
indeed monitor and if necessary alert on any imminent
failure sensed by the SMART-compliant hard disk drives.

This should be accomplished by the Operating System itself
(assisted by the SCSI controller BIOS) without having to
install a dedicated SMART monitoring software utility.

Please advise on the detailed settings I should assign in
the Performance Logs and Alerts console and in the Event
viewer of Windows 2000 Professional, to achieve this goal.

NOTE: The W2K Computer Management Help page on Monitoring
disk activity does provide a recommended list of physical
disk counters for troubleshooting, capacity planning, and
for measuring activity on a physical volume.
However, none of those counters addresses the basic
mechanical and thermal parameters that constitute
S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and enable predicting disk failure
long before it occurs.
 
I believe the Windows NT-class systems do not provide a S.M.A.R.T.
interface to any app. If they did it would be a kernel function, and
I've never seen any hint of that. These systems provide only an
access-retry function that can trigger a failure message that itself
warns of impending doom, or a flat disk failure message which indicates
that recovery may not be possible.

The utilities that manufacturers provide are themselves
product-specific, which indicates (to me at least) that while S.M.A.R.T.
tests and the resulting recordkeeping and predictive functions may be
pretty well defined, the command sets used to execute these analyses on
different products are not. It might inflate the kernel quite a bit
should this stuff be included in the OS (or even in any BIOS) for the
great number of drives available.

It would be great to have, I agree...but if it's there anywhere in
Windows it must be a closely-held MS-lab secret. If I'm wrong, I'd love
to be corrected!
 
Dan,

May I add my thanks to Pavel for finding MS discussion on
WMI Support for SMART Drives.
As they explain, Management applications can take
advantage of these capabilities in several ways.

Examples include taking an action based on seeing
the "Failure Predict Event" launch or periodically polling
the condition of "Read Failure Predict Status."

In fact, in order to take advantage of WMI for S.M.A.R.T.
monitoring, one has to study the Microsoft Platform SDK
and the Windows DDK, and then write management
applications or software utilities that will involve the
WMI GUIDs related to Failure Prediction, etc.

What I am looking for in Windows 2000 Professional is,
after I take the following initial steps:

Start > Run > perfmon.exe /wmi > Right-click Counter Logs
New Log Settings [or: Right-click Alerts >
Click to expand...

New Alert Settings > ] > Name: SMART > OK > Add >

What Performance objects to choose to add, and what
counters to select, so that the S.M.A.R.T. related
WMI GUIDs will be activated, without having to write
special scripts or resort to third-party utilities?

I hope MS experts will show us the way from this point.
 
Hmm... maybe I haven't searched enough but it seems that nobody offers WMI oriented SMART
monitors. Getting raw SMART counters from a local drive is easy enough.
For example this small program doesn't need any drivers etc.
http://www.beyondlogic.org/consulting/smart/smart.htm
The hard and most important part is interpreting and understanding results.
From what I've seen, this is quite controversal. At least, very vendor dependent.
But if there will be a vendor-dependent part is responsible for interpreting raw data as good/bad,
it can immediately fire alarm to user.
So it's good that MS provided generic WMI object, but WMI does not add any
value here, why messing with it at all.

I am looking for a SMART monitor myslef, after losing some data :(
Am very disappointed that my new (and expensive) IBM and Dell PCs come with no SMART monitor
for Windows. Of course,they have diag utilities with SMART, but to use them you need to reboot and so on.
Ariolic ActiveSmart looks good enough, I'll try it.

Regards,
-PA

Ben-Zion Joselson said:
Dan,

May I add my thanks to Pavel for finding MS discussion on
WMI Support for SMART Drives.
As they explain, Management applications can take
advantage of these capabilities in several ways.

Examples include taking an action based on seeing
the "Failure Predict Event" launch or periodically polling
the condition of "Read Failure Predict Status."

In fact, in order to take advantage of WMI for S.M.A.R.T.
monitoring, one has to study the Microsoft Platform SDK
and the Windows DDK, and then write management
applications or software utilities that will involve the
WMI GUIDs related to Failure Prediction, etc.

What I am looking for in Windows 2000 Professional is,
after I take the following initial steps:

Start > Run > perfmon.exe /wmi > Right-click Counter Logs
New Log Settings [or: Right-click Alerts >
Click to expand...

New Alert Settings > ] > Name: SMART > OK > Add >

What Performance objects to choose to add, and what
counters to select, so that the S.M.A.R.T. related
WMI GUIDs will be activated, without having to write
special scripts or resort to third-party utilities?

I hope MS experts will show us the way from this point.
-----Original Message-----
Pavel - thanks very much! :-)
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/driver/wmi/smartdrv.msp
x
Click to expand...
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