Volker Kuhlmann wrote: >>Did some googling.... question have you turned on S.M.A.R.T. for your >>hard drive in the BIOS if you have the option? > > I think I turned it off to prevent the BIOS doing bad things I don't > want it to. BIOSes aren't made for Linux. If the BIOS did detect a > problem, how is it going to tell me? Crash my kernel with an MS-windows > popup?
I've never used any linux specific tools for SMART monitoring, but they exist, as does kernel level support of some description it seems. Now I don't know if the kernel drivers actually *do* anything with SMART, but I can't see how it could hurt to turn it on, its not an *unsupported* feature. $ ls /proc/ide/hd?/smart* /proc/ide/hda/smart_thresholds /proc/ide/hda/smart_values $ apt-cache search S.M.A.R.T. smartmontools - control and monitor storage systems using S.M.A.R.T. > You can't turn DMA off, you'll get an unusable machine. You can turn DMA off and still have a perfectly usable machine, you'll just be running at less than optimum efficiency ;) A couple of years back for many an hour I toiled with DMA on an older motherboard and dodgy DMA support for my motherboard (Beware the EXPERIMENTAL kernel options!) I could take the speed increase, and get the occassional lockup from DMA issues, or turn off DMA and have a much more stable machine, sometime later bugs were fixed in the kernel and I got the best of both worlds. Eventually the onboard sound for that motherboard was supported too. Sascha
