Worth logging smart-values over a long time?

[Santa Claus]

Hi, is it worth the hassle to log changes in smart-values for a long time?

What i want to accomplish with this is to be notified of any problem before the harddrive fails so i can make backup's of important data.
Log smart-values so i can see what have changed over several months of use.

But there are several problems with this and im not thinkin about the difficulty with predicting a failure.
Software can report different values for the same harddrive, threshold can be set from factory way beoynd logic and different brands handles smart differently.

So the main quetion is, is it worth the problem to log the values?
Which program would work best?
How much can smart-values be trusted?
Write your own questions, perhap even with an answer;)

The harddrive i want to log is a 4day old WD6400AKS, but if its works good i will also log the harddrives in my backup computer, 2seagate 1hitachi 1ibm and 1wd.

Regards

[gersson]

I don't think it is worth it.
You could use that effort to make backups instead.
I have so much GB of data that it is a pain to have a separate backup but there really is very little else to do.

[SockMan!]

Eh. The drives can fail even if SMART shows nothing. It might help warn against impending doom so I might check it every once in a while especially if a drive is new or old. I wouldn't depend on it though.

[DeathFromBelow]

SMART may not show a problem. Drive failures often occur out of the blue.

If you're running Vista it will automatically alert you if it detects a problem with a hard drive (I assume from the SMART data) and let you know its about to fail.

[AreEss]

The only value is in trending, and in home systems, it's worthless. There are better things to monitor and trend, and SMART itself has limited usability to begin with. I have a Seagate with zero SMART errors thanks to godawful firmware programming, that loves to pull random full resets every couple of hours.