On  3 Jun 98 at 8:27, Michael Beechey wrote:

> I'm a little out of the loop down here. I've seen a couple of recent
> references to this kind of thing by OEMs:
>
> "The hard drive in this system monitors itself and advises you in the
> event of an impending failure"
>
> Who is making this type of hard drive? Anyone have +/- experience?

  Seagate, for one.  I believe this is referring to the START (it's
an acronym, something about "... Tracking And Reporting ...").  A
BIOS which supports it will offer the option to enable it or disable
it.
  Unfortunately, the only systems with such BIOSes that I have had a
chance to work on have been SCSI only, and our observation is that
leaving START enabled interferes with the SCSI controller, as if we
had not completely disabled EIDE in the BIOS.  This strongly suggests
that it's an EIDE-only feature.
  It may quite possibly connect into LANdesk or other remote system
management/monitoring tools.

David G