Windows 7 SMART for HDDs not working

[twhitestone]

I have Windows 7 64 Bit and I've noticed that the SMART for my hard drives are not working when I'm in Windows 7 but they are fine when I'm in XP so I was wondering if someone could tell me what drivers I need to download for my motherboard for this particular function. I went in to the Device Manager and found that all my disk say SCSI but they are SATA so I dunno if this is right and in the Device Manager no drivers seem to be missing. Anyhow I have a Biostar MCP6P-M2 mobo and they dont have any Windows 7 64 Bit drivers but they do I have Vista 64 Bit so I thought I would try those but they have so many drivers with names for parts of the mobo I dont recognize so I dont know which ones I'm suppose to be looking for, could someone help me out with this, thanks.

 

[kemical]

Hi,

All the drivers for your board can be found here:

Link Removed due to 404 Error

Don't worry about your SATA drives being seen as SCSI as it's normal. SCSI is an older type of connection thats all..
As for the SMART system. I'm not sure why it doesn't work in vista or 7 but it doesn't..(when using SATA/RAID anyway) Perhaps another member of the forum could shed light on this?

 

[twhitestone]

Hi,

All the drivers for your board can be found here:

BIOSTAR :: MCP6P-M2 :: Driver

Don't worry about your SATA drives being seen as SCSI as it's normal. SCSI is an older type of connection thats all..
As for the SMART system. I'm not sure why it doesn't work in vista or 7 but it doesn't..(when using SATA/RAID anyway) Perhaps another member of the forum could shed light on this?

Oh really SMART doesn't work with Vista or Windows 7, wow I never knew that but then I guess I sort of skipped Vista. But it also seems that none of my sensors for temps work either with HDD Programs like Speedfan cant see the temps. Thanks for the Biostar Link, I had found that but I just couldn't figure which driver would be the right one to effect the HDD sensors, like SMU or SMBus Drivers?

 

[kemical]

Same here.... I use speedfan with a RAID set up and again speedfan won't detect temps ect... I had a mobo with the same chipset as yours and it uses a Promise RAID controller chip if I remember correctly and that too wouldn't show SMART or temps ect (under vista -7 wasn't out then)... As your obviously finding out..

 

[textureDnB]

Funny I'm running an ASUS p5b-vm whch has an Intel 965 chipset and ICH8 SATA controller and speedfan reads my HDD temps no problem in seven. It must be a little hit and miss. I don't know for sure about the SMART data since in my opinion it's better to treat every HDD like it's going to die in my sleep tonight.


I just noticed a bit late that some of us (not the OP) are talking about HDD in an array. Mine are not and i don't think the OP is either. Just so were all on the same page.

 

[twhitestone]

Funny I'm running an ASUS p5b-vm whch has an Intel 965 chipset and ICH8 SATA controller and speedfan reads my HDD temps no problem in seven. It must be a little hit and miss. I don't know for sure about the SMART data since in my opinion it's better to treat every HDD like it's going to die in my sleep tonight.

I guess it's all depends on the chipset cause I have nforce sata chipset and it's an AMD setup, mine wont work with any programs fo SMART or temps unless I'm in XP I feel the same way about HDD failing but I recently took a risk and got a Seagate 1.5TB and from reviews I'm going to spend quite a few sleepless nights worrying about data loss so I'm trying to run a many test as possible beforehand. Luckily I dual-boot with XP and I'll just test everything in XP. I use HDDTune and WD Diagnostics, are there any other HDD test programs anyone can suggest to put my mine at ease? I wish I had not gotten so caughtup in the great price of this 1.5tb seagate and paid extra for the WD but it's too late now so I have to put this thing thru as much hell as possible to make sure it wont fail and take my data with it No mine are not in a RAID array, just regular hdd setup.

 

[kemical]

I think it's true what your saying about it depending on which chipset your using.. I've used nforce chipsets as well as AMD and when using SATA/RAID (which both go through the same controller and use the same driver) I've never seen any temps or SMART data. I've tried like buggery to get it working but to no avail.. AMD does have a utility called RAIDXpert or something like that and this will report some information back to you. This is quite limited though and just basically says 'This drives in working order' or something along those lines...
To keep an eye on my drives I periodically test them with HD Tach (download from here: |MG| HDTach 3.0.4.0 Download )

Once you've installed it, make sure you right-click on the 'exe' and change the compatibility to XP SP3 otherwise it won't run.. I just ran a bench and here's the screenie.....

 

[twhitestone]

Thanks, I'll give HDTach a try