What is S.M.A.R.T. ?
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology
It is firmware on your had disk that collections information about your disk drive that may indicate failure for your drive. In addition S.M.A.R.T. make some predictions about how long your drive will last.
History of S.M.A.R.T.
(Most of this info is from the Wikipedia entry, and some was directly copied from)
IBM started with some disk monitoring tools back in 1992. Later Compaq and some drive manifactures starte to add some info.
Per Wikipedia
Compaq submitted their implementation to Small Form Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Small_Form_Committee&action=edit) for standardization in early 1995.[7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T#_note-6)] It was supported by IBM, by Compaq's development partners Seagate, Quantum, and Conner, and by Western Digital (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital)
who did not have a failure prediction system at the time. The Committee
chose IntelliSafe's approach as it gives more flexibility. The
resulting jointly-developed standard was named S.M.A.R.T.
Next Slide (Future Meetings/20070728/2. S.M.A.R.T. Today)