Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller 11 User’s Guide PERC H755, H750, H355, and H350 Controller Series

The SMART feature monitors certain physical aspects of all motors, heads, and physical disk electronics to help detect predictable hard drive failures. Data on SMART compliant hard drives can be monitored to identify changes in values and determine whether the values are within threshold limits. Many mechanical and electrical failures display some degradation in performance before failure.

A SMART failure is also referred to as predicted failure. There are numerous factors that are predicted physical disk failures, such as a bearing failure, a broken read/write head, and changes in spin-up rate. In addition, there are factors that are related to read/write surface failure, such as seek error rate and excessive bad sectors.