Review of the Home Server SMART Add-In for Windows Home Server

This week saw the release of a new Windows Home Server Add-In called Home Server SMART from Dojo North Software.

What this add-in does is monitor the health of your hard drives in your Windows Home Server.

Here is what what Dojo North Software have to say:

Home Server SMART is a Windows Home Server (WHS) add-in that enables you to monitor the health of most of your hard disks attached to WHS. Home Server SMART examines the S.M.A.R.T. data exposed by your disks and determines the health of the disk. If problems are detected, Home Server SMART informs you which attribute(s) are critical or problematic, and it presents a summary of problems found. If the problems are serious, Home Server SMART will make a recommendation to you that you replace the disk.

Disks that are connected via IDE (PATA) and SATA (including eSATA), support Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) and report that S.M.A.R.T. data via the standard Microsoft storage driver (most modern PATA/SATA drives do), are fully supported. Unfortunately, since neither USB nor IEEE 1394 (FireWire) attached disks report S.M.A.R.T. data in a standardized manner, Home Server SMART cannot read S.M.A.R.T. data from them. However, it can read the standard Microsoft storage driver “failure predicted” flag, and USB/IEEE 1394 expose this, so if the storage driver detects a potential problem, Home Server SMART will alert you to it.

Simply log into the WHS Console, select the Home Server SMART add-in and immediately see all installed/connected disks. Click on a disk to see more details about the disk.

Need help? Find a bug? Want to see a new feature? Check out the Dojo North Software forum!

INSTALLING

Installation the add-in was very simple and is just like installing any other add-in for WHS.

USING HOME SERVER SMART

Once you have installed the add-in, when you restart the WHS Console you will see a new tab called Home Server SMART.

When you click on this tab you will be presented with a list of your hard drives which you can click on one by one to see the results.

Here is my first hard drive – and yes, I have problems with it (I have to say I am not very happy about this fact as it is a fairly new HP DataVault X510 so for the primary drive to be failing already is not a good thing!).

The second and third hard drives are fine (phew!).

You can also click on a drive and then select SMART status to get more information – as you can see my primary drive has some problems where as my others don’t!

There is also a very good Quick Help function which explains everything.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I think this add-in is great – it’s really easy to install and use, and frankly who wouldn’t like some notice about possible drive failures (I have had a few over the years and surprisingly enough they never happen at a good time!).

Best of all this add-in is free – although as the author says “Treat Me to a Starbucks Frappuccino”.

I think this is a must have add-in for any Windows Home Server.

All I have to do now is decide what to do about my dodgy primary drive!

To learn more about Home Server SMART, and to download it, click here.