S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. It was developed by a number of major Hard Disk Drive Manufacturers in a concerted effort to increase the reliability of drives. It is a technology that enables the PC to predict the future failure of hard disk drives. S.M.A.R.T. technology has become an industry standard for hard drive manufacturers.

The S.M.A.R.T. system does just what its name implies it does. It monitors the drive for anything that might seem out of the ordinary, documents it, and analyzes the data. If it sees something that indicates a problem, it is capable of notifying the user (or, if applicable, system administrator).

S.M.A.R.T. monitors the disk's performance, bad sectors, calibration, CRC errors, disk spin up time, distance between the head and the disk, temperature, features of medium, heads, motor or servomechanism. In all, over 35 attributes are covered by S.M.A.R.T. The errors that the system can detect can be predicted by a number of methods. Currently the SMART system can detect around 70% of all hard drive errors.

For example, motor and/or bearing failure can be predicted by an increase in the drive spin-up time and the number of retries it takes to succeed in spinning up the drive. Or, if the drive notes that the error correction is being used excessively, it can attribute this to a broken drive head or contamination, and alert before the problem gets worse.

Armed with a failure prediction, the user or system manager can back up key data, replace a suspect device prior to data loss, or avoid undesired downtime.

Active SMART utilizes S.M.A.R.T. technology to monitor your hard drive's internal S.M.A.R.T. attributes and drive temperatures, predict possible drive fail and prevent data loss. 

Using your notification settings, Active SMART lets you know about a potential disk health problem before you lose valuable data.

Active SMART allows every disk in the system to be monitored for faults and potential failure 24 hours for a day for things that may lead to a crash. If a fault is detected, you are notified with various local alerting options or you can enable remote notifications via e-mail or other network mail applications with the drive ID and the time of the first fault. Active SMART uses special algorithms to predict the fail date of the drive. 

Active SMART works on Windows95(OSR2), Windows98, Windows ME, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server systems.

Active SMART is a S.M.A.R.T. system compliant software.