S.M.A.R.T. is a self-diagnostic system for a hard drive or solid-state drive. By regularly monitoring this information, you can predict when the device is about to deteriorate and migrate your data to new storage in a timely manner.
Tools for viewing this information can be found both as part of modern systems and using some third-party applications.
For hard drives, the most critical parameters are:
- Remapped Sectors
- Sector Reallocation Events
- Uncorrectable (bad) Sectors
Ideally, their actual values should be zero (besides the actual values, there are others that can be ignored). If even one of these parameters exceeds 0, data may begin to deteriorate, although a drive with fifty or more bad sectors may still function for several years.
For solid-state drives (SSDs), the main parameter is the drive’s health, usually measured as a percentage. 100% is excellent, 0% indicates a high risk of data loss. This parameter usually depends heavily on the volume of data being written, so if large game files are frequently updated, the percentage may drop significantly. Therefore, it’s ideal to store important information on a separate storage device that doesn’t contain frequently updated games or system files.