NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

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Apoptosis
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NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

I know for a fact that the 680i SLI chipset used to have S.M.A.R.T. on it as it was once an option in the BIOS... I just updated my 680i SLI and 680i LT motherboards to the latest BIOS revisions P05 on the LT and P30 on the 680i SLI and both are missing this feature...

What is S.M.A.R.T. -- S.M.A.R.T. For Hard Disks: Enables Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Report Technology - SMART - for the hard disk, in case it has this technology (all new hard disks have it). It is a preventive internal diagnostic facility that is performed by hard disk informing to processor the probability of a possible damage in a near future, thus giving time for the user to backup his data before damage occurs.

S.M.A.R.T. was on the early BIOS revisions... Here is a screen shot with it on there... I think this was revision P23 or P21 BIOS....
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

Here is a screen shot of BIOS version P30 that is dated 7/9/2007 on the nvidia 680i SLI that I just took 5 minutes ago... no SMART can be found here or any place else in the BIOS... And boy how the BIOS arrangement has changed since the reviewers have reviewed the board many months ago.

This sucks as how are you supposed to monitor internal temperatures and know about failure issues? I'm going to go out on a limb here, but is NVIDIA going away from an open standard (S.M.A.R.T.) to make people use their NVIDIA MediaShield Storage utility instead?
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

okay this is weird... was looking around the web and is seems the ASUS P5N32-E SLI (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI) has S.M.A.R.T. support...

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But I guess this makes sense, becuase ASUS designed their own board and BIOS... ECS, BFG Tech, XFX, eVGA and others are all just using the reference design by NVIDIA with their BIOS and are all missing S.M.A.R.T. support... I also found that P28, P29 and P30 are all missing SMART... hum
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by dicecca112 »

I thought SMART support was hard drive supported? Can you read the SMART info in Windows?
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

not if smart isn't enabled in the BIOS -- all recent hard drives have smart, but doesn't do any good if the BIOS does look at that information.
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by kenc51 »

dicecca112 wrote:I thought SMART support was hard drive supported? Can you read the SMART info in Windows?
Download a tool called "DTemp".
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

yeah I have along with HHDLife, Everest and others... they detect nothing... DTemp just doesn't nothing and HDDLife says no SMART devices found...

If S.M.A.R.T. isn't enabled there is nothing for these utilities to monitor.
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by kenc51 »

Apoptosis wrote:yeah I have along with HHDLife, Everest and others... they detect nothing... DTemp just doesn't nothing and HDDLife says no SMART devices found...

If S.M.A.R.T. isn't enabled there is nothing for these utilities to monitor.
I was answering Dicecca's question, ;)
dicecca112 wrote:I thought SMART support was hard drive supported? Can you read the SMART info in Windows?
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by dicecca112 »

I was asking Nate the question, wasn't asking in General if you can read SMART info in Windows, I know you can. I think we all have been doing too much of this :drinkers:
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by MakubeX »

Well that sucks. I currently have an eVGA 680i A1 with the P28 BIOS. I downloaded the P30 some time ago but haven't got around to flash it. After knowing this I don't think I want to anymore.

Why in the World would they disable the S.M.A.R.T. feature? Was it a mistake or on purpose? :?
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

Does P28 have smart in it?
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by MakubeX »

Apoptosis wrote:Does P28 have smart in it?
Yeah, it does.
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Apoptosis »

talked with NVIDIA and they said it's enabled by defualt and is no longer a BIOS option... Still doesn't work for me, but I'm moving on.
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by mickrussom »

Apoptosis wrote:S.M.A.R.T. was on the early BIOS revisions... Here is a screen shot with it on there... I think this was revision P23 or P21 BIOS....
Award BIOS. Sheesh. Now I know for sure I'm not going to get any NVIDIA chipset based motherboards. That BIOS looks awful similar to BIOSes form the 486 era.
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Re: NVIDIA 680i SLI and LT Motherboards Don't Have S.M.A.R.T.

Post by Scooter »

A quick lesson...

S.M.A.R.T. is a passive hard drive feature. That is, once it is enabled, the hard drive collects information, in the background, about any problems that are encountered by the drive. There are plenty of problems (single-bit ECC errors, etc.) that the drive will recover from automatically - and in some cases even fix - without telling anyone about it. In order to see this data - including the drive's own prediction regarding its long-term health - you have to run software that goes to the drive and asks for it.

Almost all BIOS implementations - regardless of pedigree - perform two S.M.A.R.T. operations during POST. First, they go to the hard drive(s) and tell them to enable their S.M.A.R.T. capability. Then, they poll the hard drives to determine whether they are predicting impending failure. If a failure is being predicted, the BIOS will generate an on-screen message and pause. But, if no failure is being predicted, the BIOS does nothing. Now, some BIOS implementations provide a place in their setup screens that allows you to enable or disable this set of operations and some don't. It's going to be rare that you find any recent systems that don't support the feature, however.

BTW, the Windows O/Ss (Win2K and newer) contain support for S.M.A.R.T. built-in. You can go into the WMI repository, using browser or programmatic data extraction, and see the failure prediction status (and even raw attribute/threshold information) for most hard drives...
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