Acronym for Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology.

If you see your BIOS refer to S.M.A.R.T this is it. The Hard drive supports many features that people aren't normally aware. A hard drive can try and predict it's failure, and can tell you various parts about it's health, configure it for security, perform a "security disk wipe" and all sorts of goodies.

Grab "smartsuite": http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartsuite and try

First enable SMART

smartctl -e /dev/hdx

Then view it's information

smartctl -a /dev/hdx

It's amazing, it gives you the total running time of the drive, how many times it's been power cycled (!), how many sectors have been remapped (and when!).

Definately one of computings li'l secrets.