Reprinted from a Granite Digital press release:
Granite Digital, a leading manufacturer of FireWire 1394 storage solutions, has begun shipping S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Reporting, and Analysis Technology) in its SMART Hot-Swap Drive family of external FireWire enclosures. The new Granite Hot-Swap Drive is the most versatile storage systems on the market. With the low cost of IDE hard drives you can now affordably use hard drives to backup your computer, transport large amounts of data, dedicate drives for projects, and completely eliminate the need for tape drives and other archival systems. It’s the ideal solution for your removable storage needs and it is faster than all other types of archival systems.
Combined with Granite Digital’s SMART user interface – a unique LCD display built into every SMART Hot-Swap Drive bay – the S.M.A.R.T. technology gives users the unprecedented ability to monitor the performance and reliability of their hard disks.
“When we began offering our SMART Hot-Swap Drives we told customers the built-in user interface was like having a technician in each box,” said Frank Gabrielli, President of Granite Digital. “With the addition of S.M.A.R.T. we’re building on that foundation, and we’re extending our lead in offering the best FireWire enclosures in the industry.”
S.M.A.R.T. is an industry standard for monitoring performance and reliability parameters in ATA hard disks. Granite Digital’s FireVue 1394-IDE bridges – at the heart of every Granite Digital SMART Drive product – incorporate proprietary, patent-pending technology which allow the FireWire bridges to use S.M.A.R.T. to monitor hard disk reliability. The unique, built-in LCD display in each SMART Drive product allows the user to view performance and reliability data in real-time – without the need for any software on the host computer.
Granite Digital SMART Hot-Swap Drive check S.M.A.R.T. status periodically during periods of hard disk inactivity. Using the built-in LCD display users can manually view S.M.A.R.T. parameters and error logs and run S.M.A.R.T. self tests. Granite Digital SMART Hot-Swap Drive enclosures have been tested with hard disks from Maxtor, IBM, Seagate, and Western Digital; and SMART Drive products are compatible with Apple’s OS X and OS 9 operating systems and Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
