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I have administration of a computer - Compaq CQ1-2025 - that has not been hardware modified in any way. According to specifications it has a 320 GB SATA hard disk in it. When I ran SpinRite disk utility on it it said it could not read the SMART data from the hard drive. I cannot imagine a drive modern enough to be SATA not having SMART data publishing. Am I wrong? I know SpinRite can read SMART data because it has done so on other machines. Is this a bug in it or a hardware issue?

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Do you use on-board RAID? – haimg Jan 16 at 0:06
No, this machine does not have hardware RAID capabilities. – K.A Jan 16 at 0:07
SpinRite? Try CrystalDiskInfo‌​. – Karan Jan 16 at 5:53

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My guess would be to try different software that can read the SMART data on a disk. Try, for example, the free SpeedFan software. This monitors temperatures of your CPU, etc. as well, but it can look at SMART data.

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This worked. SpinRite must just not be able to handle the newer drive. – K.A Jan 16 at 17:52
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I don't believe that there are SATA drives without SMART. Most probably this is some kind of software issue with SpinRite. Try some other software, like Argus Monitor (works with many different chipsets).

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This would sound right - I wouldn't trust SpinRite with anything essential, as it has a habit of messing up on newer drives... – Rory Alsop Jan 16 at 0:13

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