No matter how fast your CPU or memory are, disk drives and peripherals are the biggest bottlenecks to system performance. After you spend all day tweaking and revving up your CPU and memory, you’re rewarded with the same old sluggish disk drives, which undermine any other performance-improving hacks. In this chapter, we’ll cover some easy and often free tune-ups to get your disks living up to your system’s demands and your expectations of reliability by making informed partitioning choices and using the tools necessary to prepare a hard drive for file storage.

Do you know how much of your hard disk space you’re wasting? If you are using Windows 95, 98, 98SE, or ME (even 2000 or XP without NTFS), you could be wasting at least 10% and possibly up to 30% of your hard drive space due to suboptimal allocation unit sizes.

Disk partitions are logical regions of a disk drive containing a filesystem. Partitioning a hard disk is like subdividing parcels of land and dictating how those parcels will be further subdivided into lots or common areas. Partitioning establishes how big the parcel of land to be used will be. The filesystem within a partition contains files and directories that are organized in what we see as a hierarchical tree structure.

We use the filesystem and the tools and support for it within an operating system to put things into and take them out of the “parcels” (called clusters ) of space allocated in the partition. If we put a small house in a large parcel (cluster) we have a lot of empty space. In terms of land, we could landscape or farm that space, but in terms of filesystems, we get only one “house” per cluster. One house may occupy many clusters, but nothing else can use that cluster, even if there is empty space within it.

The Different Filesystems

After you’ve partitioned a drive, you need to decide which filesystems will actually live on it. There are dozens of different filesystems you may encounter in the wild. Here are a few:

DOS FAT-12, FAT-16, FAT-32

DOS filesystems known as FAT-12, FAT-16, and FAT-32 (although no version of DOS supports FAT-32) have evolved from the early days (when only diskettes were available) to support increasingly larger hard drives. The “FAT” in the filesystem names stands for File Allocation Table, which is something every filesystem has in some form but that stuck as the exclusive name for DOS filesystems. The numeric designation refers to how many bits of information are available to identify the clusters where files are stored: 12 bits allows 4,096 clusters/files (including directories), 16 allows 65,536 clusters/files to be kept track of, and 32 bits allows up to 4.2 billion clusters/files to be kept track of in a single partition. The directory entry in a FAT filesystem keeps track of start and end clusters for each portion of a file that is stored, as well as the filesystem attributes—Read-Only, Archive status, Hidden, and System files. No file access security is provided for in a DOS/FAT file system.

NTFS

One or more NTFS partitions may exist on a hard drive, with or without Primary and Extended or Non-DOS partitions. NTFS is a journaling filesystem, meaning that it records information about filesystem activity to improve recoverability in the event of a system crash. NTFS uses two methods to keep track of directories and files: first, a Master File Table (MFT) that “knows all” about the directories or folders and files on the disk and, second, the files themselves, which store information about the files. In fact, if a file is small enough, it is contained within the MFT itself rather than on a separate area of the disk. Directories in NTFS store information about the directory, not the files in them. The information about a file in an NTFS filesystem stores not only filename, location, and attributes, but also security information. The number of files and directories NTFS can store is almost limitless, unless the Master File Tables grow so large from keeping track of so many files that they consume all the free space on the drive.

ext, ext2, and ext3

The ext filesystems are used by Linux. ext supports drives and individual files as large as 2 GB. ext2 supports partitions as large as 4 Terabytes and files as large as 2 GB (Linux 2.2) and over 2 GB for Linux 2.4 and above. ext3 is a journaling filesystem compatible with ext2. A journaling filesystems makes a record of filesystem changes before they are made, which adds greater reliability to the file activity.

reiserfs

reiserfs is a journaling filesystem with exceptional granular security capabilities suitable for military applications, developed under DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) sponsorship. Significant information on reiserfs can be found at http://www.namesys.com.

jfs

jfs is a journaling filesystem for Linux servers developed by IBM. More information about jfs can be found at http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/jfs/.

The FAT and NTFS filesystems track disk space use in predefined allocations of clusters. Clusters are made up of one or more 512-byte units of storage space. Under the FAT-16 filesystem, the maximum number of clusters is determined by a 16-bit numbering system and a predetermined maximum number of 512-byte sectors of space per cluster. These days, the only place you are likely to encounter FAT-16 partitions is on much older computers, flash memory cards, and embedded systems, but you can still create a FAT-16 filesystem if you need to access the space through an older (6.22 and earlier) version of DOS.

Under these design constraints and limitations, the largest possible disk partition in a FAT-16 filesystem may consist of 65,536 clusters of data. The maximum allowable cluster data size is 64 sectors per cluster, or 32,768 bytes. In total, the maximum size of a FAT-16 disk partition is approximately 2,048 megabytes (2 gigabytes). (The previous partition size limitation under early DOS versions using the FAT-12 filesystem was a meager 32 megabytes.) Table 5-1 lists the FAT-16 cluster sizes for various partition sizes. By the way, a cluster may contain only one file reference, so there is also a limitation on the total number of files a FAT filesystem can keep track of: 65,536 files for FAT-16.

Table 5-1. Cluster sizes for FAT-16 partitions

Partition size	FAT-16 cluster size
0-127 MB	2 KB = 2,048 Bytes (4 sectors)
128-255 MB	4 KB = 4,096 Bytes (8 sectors)
256-511 MB	8 KB = 8,192 Bytes (16 sectors)
512-1,023 MB	16 KB = 16,384 Bytes (32 sectors)
1,024-2,047 MB	32 KB = 32,768 Bytes (64 sectors)

Tip

With a FAT filesystem it is possible under any filesystem to run out of disk space not because you’ve filled up your entire drive with files but because you’ve used up the number of file allocations the filesystem provides, so the more clusters you have, the higher the total number of files you can store.

The FAT-32 filesystem supported under Windows 95 OEM SR2, 98, 98SE, Me, NT (SP4 and later), 2000, and XP can accommodate disk drives up to 4 terabytes in size (32 GB under Windows 2000), with as many as 4 billion clusters/files with cluster sizes of 32 KB. For very small (512-byte) files this results in less than 2% file storage efficiency and a gross waste of space, indicating that partitioning your drive to use smaller cluster sizes is advisable for many of us. FAT-32 limits the maximum file size to 2 GB, which is adequate for most of us, but if you expect to work with larger files—large databases for example—you must use NTFS. Table 5-2 lists the cluster sizes for FAT-32 partitions.

Table 5-2. Cluster sizes for FAT-32 partitions

Partition size	FAT-32 cluster size
0-259 MB	512 bytes (1 sector)
260-511 MB	4 KB (8 sectors)
512-8,191 MB	8 KB (16 sectors)
8,192-16,383 MB	16 KB (32 sectors)
32,768 MB-2 Terabytes	32 KB (64 sectors)

The NTFS also allocates disk space in increments or units as little as 512 bytes—which, coincidentally, is the size of a single sector of disk space. Like the FAT filesystem, unless you select an allocation unit of 512 bytes when partitioning and formatting, sectors are usually combined to make up clusters, but NTFS has a large enough numeric range to keep track of a lot of clusters, so clusters can be as small as a single 512-byte sector or made up of multiple sectors. The maximum number of units—clusters or sectors—that NTFS can keep track of provides for maximum disk space capacities in the order of terabytes. The most space any file will waste is only some portion of the clusters—as is evident with FAT filesystems. As shown in Table 5-3, NTFS uses clusters to track file storage, but these clusters are much smaller than the clusters of FAT-16 or FAT-32 filesystems. It is possible to reformat NTFS partitions using XP’s Disk Management console to use smaller or larger cluster sizes at your discretion.

Table 5-3. Cluster sizes for Windows NTFS partitions

Partition size	NTFS cluster size
0-512 MB	512 bytes (1 sector)
512-1,024 MB	1,024 bytes (2 sectors)
1,024-2,048 MB	2,048 bytes (4 sectors)
2,048-4,096 MB	4,096 bytes (8 sectors); 8,192 bytes and larger possible
4,096-8,192 MB	8,192 bytes (16 sectors)
8,192-16,384 MB	16,384 bytes (32 sectors)
16,384-32,768 MB	32,768 bytes (64 sectors)
> 32,768 MB	65,536 bytes (128 sectors)

In most cases, when you cannot predict the general size or types of files you will be saving, large or small, it is preferable for storage efficiency to use the smallest cluster size possible. By large files I mean those measured in tens or hundreds of megabytes, something that really chews up disk space that you want to access with as few repetitive disk operations as possible (such as huge database files that may be found on servers, or video files). Most of us, unless we collect a lot of audio and video files, have mostly small datafiles—far less than a megabyte—including all the text and graphics from web pages, email, and average documents and spreadsheets.

Depending on the disk-caching read-ahead method and amount of cache used within a specific disk drive, using a 1 KB cluster size under NTFS will require the equivalent of 1,000 discrete disk accesses to read or write a 1 megabyte file versus 250 accesses with a 4 KB cluster size, but the alternative is having your average 1-2 KB web page and little (50-256 byte) graphics files chewing up 2-4 KB more disk space than they need to. A measly 2-4 KB may not seem like much, but if you let Internet Explorer’s Temporary Internet File caching grow to 512 MB or larger, you’re easily wasting 256 MB of disk space on a bunch of web files you may never see again anyway. Figure 5-1 illustrates the size of the datafile on an NTFS volume with 8,192-byte (16-sector) clusters (483 512-byte sectors or 30.1875 8,192-byte clusters) and the amount of disk space the file actually consumes (488 512-byte sectors or 30.5 8,192-byte clusters). This file ends up wasting 0.5 clusters or 4,096 bytes of disk space. If you add up a lot of datafiles wasting half a cluster or more—especially if the cluster sizes are 8, 16, 32, or 64 KB each—you end up with a lot of unusable disk space, also known as “slack” space, occupied by absolutely nothing of value.

Figure 5-1. Windows File Properties reveals actual data size versus disk space used

It is important to note that the disk operations and performance seen by the operating system can be significantly different than what goes on inside the drive itself. The drive, of course, has to read or write all sectors containing data the operating system wants and will be doing all of the mechanical work to find each and every sector needed, be they contiguous (unfragmented files) or spread out in different places on the drive (fragmented files).

The operating system’s file and directory scheme keeps track of files in the file tables (the directory of the Master File Table) and tells the drive where to get file fragments from. The drive only knows how to find tracks and sectors and doesn’t know where specific files are. If the drive’s firmware and caching scheme are smart, it will optimize file placement and file reads by itself. If the drive has a large internal cache, it will take in all or most of the operating system’s commands, tell the OS it’s “got it,” and go off and do the work, releasing the OS to do other things. Someday perhaps we’ll have operating-system-aware disk drives or specific disk drives that filesystems off-load functions to so the OS can be an OS rather than a file manager, but for now the operating system and driver vendors are responsible for optimizing their file- and disk-handling functions.

Tip

NTFS supports and can be configured to use on-the-fly file compression to save disk space on a drive-by-drive or file-by-file basis. NTFS will not compress files on a drive using a cluster size of 4 KB or less.

How do you tell what type of filesystem your disk is partitioned with?

In Windows, open My Computer, right-click on your hard drive icon, and then select Properties. You’ll see a dialog similar to that shown in Figure 5-2. Within this dialog will be a designation of the hard drive’s filesystem, in this case NTFS. With NTFS under Windows NT, 2000, or XP, we are assured of significantly more efficient use of available drive space than with FAT-16 or FAT-32 under DOS, Windows 3.x, 9x, or Me.

Figure 5-2. Windows Properties shows the filesystem type

The mount command under Linux will also show you filesystem types, as in the example below, which shows an ext3 filesystem type:

[root@rh9-lt root]# mount
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)

Use XP’s Disk Management console to create a new partition in unused disk space.

You can create a new partition in unallocated or unused space on a disk drive with Windows XP or partitioning software like PartitionMagic. In this hack, we’ll create a new 20 GB NTFS partition in unallocated disk space using Windows XP’s Disk Management tools. To do this, launch Control Panel, select Administrative Tools, then Computer Management, double-click Disk Management under Storage, and follow these steps:

Create new partitions from free or existing partition space with PartitionMagic.

PartitionMagic is one of the most popular tools for working with disk partitions under Windows. It lets you create, delete, resize, merge, or prepare partitions for different operating systems. Working on a disk drive with a couple of existing partitions is one of the things PartitionMagic is great for because its wizards show you the state of existing partitions, let you borrow space from an existing partition (actually shrinking it to make room) for a new partition, and provide three levels of safeguards to help protect your existing data before any changes are made to your disk.

In this hack, I take you through making a new partition in free space on an existing drive. Your first step is to acquire a copy of PartitionMagic and install it on your PC. You can buy and download a copy online from Symantec’s web site (http://www.symantec.com). Once installed, PartitionMagic is at your service to help you perform many disk-related tasks. To create a new partition, follow these steps:

Figure 5-13. Report showing the result after creating a new partition

Merge two partitions into one with PartitionMagic.

Whether you have two partitions or ten and need to make an adjustment to shrink or grow the size of a specific partition, or you want to move the contents of one partition into another by merging them, PartitionMagic has the power to do the work for you.

In this hack we’ll take two of the partitions we had from the previous hack, [Hack #43] and merge them into one larger partition. Starting at the main PartitionMagic window, follow these steps:

In two hacks, the power of third-party partitioning software should be quite obvious and prove to be much easier and less risky that making a lot of backups, using FDISK or XP’s Disk Management tools, and moving data yourself.

Use NT/2000/XP/2003’s CONVERT program to change a FAT partition to NTFS.

CONVERT is a command-line program with one simple function: to change a FAT partition to NTFS. Normally CONVERT applies user and system security settings to all of the files in the partition, but the command-line option /NoSecurity leaves the access rights to all files open to everyone, as if the partition were an unsecured FAT partition.

To use CONVERT to make your C: drive NTFS:

Create and delete NTFS partitions using the DISKPART from the Recovery Console.

Windows versions from NT to Windows Server 2003 know nothing about FDISK but provide their own partitioning tool, DISKPART, which is run from the Windows Recovery Console. DISKPART is a command-line utility used to add/create or delete NTFS partitions with some very simple commands.

The command line for DISKPART supports only the /add and /delete commands:

Use FDISK to restore the ability to boot from your FAT-16 or FAT-32 hard drive.

FDISK is a DOS program that can actually help you out of some of those nasty “unable to locate operating system” and “no boot drive available” error conditions Windows 9x and DOS users encounter from time to time. The Master Boot Record can be corrupted by an improper shutdown, power glitch, or disk failure. Re-creating a new Master Boot Record at the first sector of the hard drive—which is what your system BIOS is looking for in order to turn over the startup operation to an operating system—is an easy fix.

To use FDISK’s Master Boot Record restoration feature to get your main or additional drives back into bootable shape, follow these steps:

FDISK /MBR re-creates the Master Boot Record, the first sector of the hard disk. This can be helpful to repair a damaged or corrupted bootable drive.

FDISK /CMBR x re-creates the boot sector of the first (x = 1), second (x = 2), third (x = 3), or fourth (x = 4) hard disk(s).

Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003 users having problems accessing or booting from an NTFS disk can use the FIXMBR program to rewrite a new Master Boot Record on the hard drive.

FIXMBR is available only through the Recovery Console feature of Windows NT, 2000, XP, or Windows Server 2003. To access the Recovery Console, you must boot up with recovery diskettes you made during installation of the OS or select the recovery options from the installation CD. FIXMBR has one function, just like DOS’s FDISK /MBR: to write a new Master Boot Record on the disk drive.

To use FIXMBR follow these steps:

If you do not supply a device name, a new Master Boot Record will be written to the default boot device, which is typically what you want to do anyway.

If an invalid or nonstandard partition table signature is detected by FIXMBR, you will be asked if you want to continue with FIXMBR or not. How you proceed is determined by whether or not you are having problems accessing the drive. If you are not having problems accessing your drives, you should not continue.

Use FIXBOOT to restore the ability to boot from your NTFS hard drive.

Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 users having problems accessing or booting from an NTFS disk can use the FIXBOOT program to rewrite a new Master Boot Record on the hard drive.

FIXBOOT is available only through the Recovery Console feature of Windows NT, 2000, XP, or Windows Server 2003. To access the Recovery Console, you must boot up with recovery diskettes you made during installation of the OS or select the recovery options from the installation CD. FIXBOOT has one function, similar to DOS’s SYS: to write fresh boot information on the disk drive.

To use FIXBOOT, follow these steps:

If you do not supply a drive letter, FIXBOOT will write a new partition boot sector to the current partition you logged on to.

Use the SystemRescueCD to repair a blown GRUB or LILO boot.

Linux has advanced disk management and repair tools too. Of note is the SystemRescueCD from http://www.sysresccd.com. SystemRescueCD is offered as an ISO file that can be written to a CD-R to make a bootable rescue CD. The packages includes several essential tools for fixing Linux boot-up problems, including:

It also includes a variety of filesystem tools that allow you to format, resize, and debug an existing partition of your hard disk supporting e2fs, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, ntfs, and DOS partition types.

With these tools on hand, you may never have to reinstall a Linux operating system again.

Lay down some awesome data tracks on diskettes, hard drives, Zip disks, or LS-120 cartridges with FORMAT.

Logical drives and drive letters are created by the process of formatting a partition so that it is ready to accept files. Formatting is done by either the DOS FORMAT program, within the Windows 9x-2003 setup processes, or within the Disk Management console in Windows NT-2003. FORMAT provides limited options: it either creates nonbootable disk space, creates a bootable disk, or it can quick-format (erase) a diskette. For hard drives, FORMAT will lay out either NTFS, FAT-16, or FAT-32 file structures, depending on the filesystem of the partition. For 3.5” diskettes, Zip, and LS-120 media, the filesystem will always be FAT-16.

In the process, FORMAT also establishes the logical drives or drive lettering scheme we use to refer to our drives. Although the FORMAT program has more options applicable to various diskette capacities, it is also a very powerful utility when applied to hard drives.

To use all of the features of the FORMAT program, you need to be at a DOS or command prompt. Then follow these steps:

You have to format every partition you want to use for the operating system or data. FORMAT establishes the FAT filesystem and directory space. FORMAT is typically not used on NTFS partitions, which are instead formatted as part of the operating system setup process or with the Disk Management console within Windows (NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 only).

FORMAT provides the following command-line options:

FORMAT drive: [/V[:label]] [/Q] [/F:size] [/B | /S] [/C]
FORMAT drive: [/V[:label]] [/Q] [/T:tracks /N:sectors] [/B | /S] [/C]
FORMAT drive: [/V[:label]] [/Q] [/1] [/4] [/B | /S] [/C]
FORMAT drive: [/Q] [/1] [/4] [/8] [/B | /S] [/C]

The purposes of these options are as follows:

FORMAT under Windows 2000 and XP offers some additional command-line options:

Examples of common uses of FORMAT are:

Rearrange your drive letters with the Disk Management console in Windows NT-2003.

Changing drive letter assignments is useful if you have added a second hard drive to a Windows NT/2000/XP/Windows Server 2003 system. Suppose you start out with a hard drive as drive C:. The CD-ROM drive is automatically assigned as drive D:. A second hard drive added to this configuration would become drive E:, which is not what you might expect if you think hard disk drives are supposed to flow in logical, alphabetical order. What we have learned to expect from the days of DOS is for the second hard drive to become D: and the CD-ROM drive to become drive E:. You can make your new NT-2003 systems appear more like old DOS systems with a few simple drive-letter changes.

It may be more convenient now (and for later on if you add more hard drives or partitions) to move the CD-ROM drive letter up to a value far out of the way from any anticipated hard drive assignments. You can do the same for other removable media, such as digital cameras and USB FLASH drives that come and go—connecting the devices and then assigning them permanent drive letters so they will always show up as the same drive letter when used.

Follow these steps to shift the hard drive and CD-ROM drive letters to a more intuitive and predictable order:

Make your drive bootable to get a DOS or Windows 9x-Me drive back up and running quickly.

Just as the FDISK /MBR command [Hack #47] can rebuild the lost boot information from the beginning of a hard drive, a little command-prompt program named SYS.COM can help you take that bootability to where it needs to be—containing the operating system files to get the system started. If you’ve got a nonbootable drive for DOS or Windows 9x-Me that is missing either the IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, or COMMAND.COM DOS files, start your fix with FDISK /MBR. Boot from a startup diskette for the operating system you need to repair and then execute:

            SYS C:

SYS copies the basic operating system files—IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, and COMMAND.COM—from the diskette to the drive letter designated: in this case, drive C:. Remove the diskette from the drive and restart the system from the hard drive.

Corrupt installations of Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 can be fixed in minutes with their bootable setup disks.

Failed Windows 2000, XP, or Windows Server 2003 bootups—the ones that hang somewhere before or while loading Windows or produce a missing file error or blue screen—might be fixed in a few minutes using the Repair feature of their setup programs. Although FDISK /MBR and SYS C: can repair a blown boot record and replace the operating system files for DOS and Windows 9x-Me, you cannot use these commands to put the operating system boot files back onto an NT-based boot drive or for NTFS partitioned drives.

Follow these instructions to repair a broken installation:

From this point on, the repair process will try to establish the bootability of your drive and installation and restore files as needed. Admittedly a rather involved process compared to a simple FDISK /MBR and SYS C: for DOS and Windows 9x-ME systems, but it very often gets the job done. If this fails, you will have to reinstall the operating system.

Implement this hack to fix the “Typical Role of This Computer” bug in Windows 95.

Windows 95/98/Me provide a bit of disk performance control through the “typical role” settings system parameter accessible through the Hard Disk tab of the My Computer/Properties dialog, shown in Figure 5-17. This setting does not control the amount of memory allocated for disk caching by VCACHE; instead it sets aside a specific amount of RAM to hold look-up references about most recently used files and folders.

Figure 5-17. Disk performance controls in Windows 9x-Me

The number of folders and files tracked, and the amount of memory for storing the folder and file references, varies depending on the “typical role” setting, as listed in Table 5-5.

The “typical role” settings for Windows 95 are incorrect according to Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;138012). The values for folders and files are reversed for Mobile and Network settings. Only the Desktop role is correct. If the Desktop setting seems right to you, leave the settings alone. If Mobile or Network settings appeal to you, then you need to correct or modify the values stored in the Windows Registry by following these steps:

This Windows performance enhancer could make you a real loser, of your data. Make this simple tweak and compute with peace of mind.

In an effort to give us another performance boost, Windows provides the ability to cache (store in memory for later use) data that is to be written to your hard drives, writing the data only when the system is less busy. This feature puts your data at risk for some short period of time and can result in data being lost if the system crashes or the power fails before the data is safely transferred from memory to the disk drive. Write-caching is not a bad thing unless you live where power fluctuates or fails frequently. Admittedly the time window affecting this risk is very short, a second or two at most, but you cannot control when a power glitch will happen in that second or two to cause data loss.

If your PC gets power from an uninterruptible power supply, especially one that can tell Windows that power is failing so it can do a proper shutdown, you probably don’t need or want to use this hack.

Write-caching, or delayed writing, is enabled by default in all versions of Windows. We have to take deliberate steps to turn it off.

To remove the risks of delayed-write-caching for Windows 95/98/Me, follow these steps:

To disable delayed-write-caching under Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, follow these steps:

Write-caching does boost your performance, but it is best to use it only if you have a very stable system and are running your PC on an uninterruptible power supply with automatic shutdown of Windows enabled. It’s a good idea to enable the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) capabilities in your BIOS [Hack #57] .

Roughly 60% of all disk drive failures are mechanical in nature—from spindle-bearing wear to read/write heads banging into delicate disk platters—and now technology built into the drives can report anticipated and specific failures to give you a chance to rectify the situation, hopefully before it is too late to retrieve your data.

In addition to monitoring a variety of parameters related to mechanical events (disk platter RPM, time to spin up, motor current, head seek failures, and sudden shock to the drive chassis), S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) can report read and write retry attempts necessary due to defective areas on the disk or head failure or drive temperature. Many S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drives can also report how many times they have been turned on and off and the number of hours the drive has been on.

If S.M.A.R.T. is enabled in your system BIOS, the BIOS will check and report any early or permanent signs of disk failure. You can also monitor your drive’s condition with a S.M.A.R.T.-aware disk monitoring program.

To view all available S.M.A.R.T. information about your drive, try the free DiskCheck utility from http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm. DiskCheck is a nonresident utility that will show you exact drive information and all of the supported S.M.A.R.T. statuses from your drive. There’s also Ariolic Software’s ActiveSMART (http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/) resident monitoring tool, which provides a wealth of detail on drive status and notification of potential failures. If you get a S.M.A.R.T. warning about a drive failing, back up your data immediately and replace the drive.