Tracking a drive’s SMART table before and after imaging

SMART table is a valuable source of information about a hard drive’s health. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) provides stats of a drive’s operation, thus helping predict its future failure. Making a definitive conclusion based on the indices in SMART table is not easy: not all parameters are critical, it is usually a combination of bad values of a few parameters that point to a trouble, time factor plays a role too (how fast has the state of the drive been deteriorating).

SMART table is included in Diagnostics report. If you want to have a look at the current indices:

1. Click Other in the left-side menu
2. Click View SMART
3. Select the drive
4. Click Start button

SMART table attributes may differ depending on the drive manufacturer. The most critical attributes are:

• Reallocated sectors count
• Current pending sector count
• Uncorrectable sector count

When RAW value of any of these attributes is greater than zero, TaskForce will highlight it in yellow.

The worse the values, especially in these critical attributes, the more carefully the drive needs to be treated.

To keep track of the changes occurring to the attributes of the SMART table, the imaging settings can be easily adjusted to record SMART table indices prior and after each imaging session.

By comparing the two tables, user can evaluate whether the health of a drive has been deteriorating throughout the imaging session and thus assess how quickly its health has been getting worse. Any discrepancies between the two SMART tables will be highlighted in yellow.

Whenever you need to evaluate how the state of the drive has been changing long-term, you can go to previous imaging sessions and look up SMART table. TaskForce will store this information in its case management system.

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Yulia Samoteykina

Director of Marketing

Yulia believes that with a product that is exceptionally good at solving tasks of forensic experts, marketing is about explaining its capabilities to the users and advocating on the users' behalf to ensure Atola keeps on adding value and raising the bar for the industry.

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