Dell PERC13 and PERC12 User’s Guide PERC H975 Series and PERC H965 Series cards

The SMART feature monitors certain physical aspects of all motors, heads, and physical disk electronics to help detect predictable physical disk failures. Data on SMART compliant physical disks 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 of a predicted physical disk failure— bearing failure, a broken read or write head, and changes in spin-up rate. Also, there are factors related to read or write surface failure, such as seek error rate and excessive bad sectors.