[PCTECH] Does S.M.A.R.T. actually work?

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Does anyone know if S.M.A.R.T. technology in IDE drives actually works?

The hard drive in my laptop just gave up it's ghost.  No warning, no 
errors, all of a sudden it just stopped working.  90% of the time the 
system couldn't even tell it had a drive installed (luckily I was able 
to get my critical data in the 10% it actually worked).

The drive is supposed to be SMART capabile ... and I have a program 
that's supposed to monitor the SMART status, but it didn't give a peep.

Any ideas?

david