i have a few hard drives in my Vista 32-Bit Home Premium PC, and four more in a home server. basically im looking for a good HDD monitor, tio monitor SMART status and maybe even temperature, for all the hard drives in question.

i liked O&O's solution, DriveLED, but it doesnt network.

any suggestions?

im also curious about whetehr people have any faith in SMART or not. i realize its not compeltely accurate, and even the term itself is not standardized across the industry, so dont bother giving me that stuff. im jsut curious about your personal experiences. and is hard drive heat that much of an issue?

networking HDD monitors fior vista? anyone?

oh! and my server is actually currently down. i havent decided between XP Pro, Ubuntu server edition, and Windows Server 2008, or 2003 (i ahve copies of all of them except 2008, but i can get ti for a decent price if i have to), so..whatever works.

First what type of server are you using in terms of hardware and applications?

what exactly are you looking for when you say network support? Emailing daily reports, constant realtime reporting, event logging, etc?

Have you looked at the software listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitori....M.A.R.T._tools

There is also Everest Corporate Edition which can do network auditing.
http://www.lavalys.com/products/overview.p...=CE&lang=en

Heat is the main cause of hard drive failure in my experience, then excessive seeking on full and fragmented disks. There was a study done by Google which IIRC found that rapid fluctuations within the operating temperature affected drives more then just maintaining a high or low non-operating temperature.

[EDIT] I will need to double check my opinion, here is the paper:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.html

RAID Servers can improve data life and performance IMO by distributing read/writes across drives thus spreading the usage across disks. BTW try to use drives from different batches so if they are defective they dont all fail at the same time.