S.M.A.R.T. hard drive fitness check is now freely available on the Web.

Click here to try BelDrive.

Maynard, MA -- January 4, 1999 -- Belarc, Inc. and the Your!PC web site announce the release of the first freely available S.M.A.R.T. hard drive fitness product. S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is an early warning technology originally developed by I.B.M. for their mainframe drives to give advanced warning of drive failures. This technology has now been made freely available over the Web to end- users of many ATA/IDE hard disk drives for their PC systems. Simply go to: http://yourpc.net/harddrives.html
install the BelDrive browser plug-in and view your hard drive status in your browser. Its as simple as that.

Background on S.M.A.R.T. - The underlying technology was developed by I.B.M. and called "Predictive Failure Analysis". Large mainframe data centers wanted to know in advance if a hard disk drive was going to fail, because this gave them the opportunity to take steps to protect their data. Later Compaq announced IntelliSafeTM, a diagnostic which operated with a number of disk drive manufacturers. These products were submitted to the ATA/IDE standards committees and the resulting standard was named S.M.A.R.T. Today all major hard disk drive manufacturers support S.M.A.R.T., including IBM, Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, and Fujitsu.

How can S.M.A.R.T. help a PC end-user? Not all hard drive failures are predictable, but many mechanical failures are predictable and this is where S.M.A.R.T. can be of help to PC end-users. S.M.A.R.T. measures many attributes (1) of the user's drive over time and decides if they are moving out of tolerance. Knowing that your hard drive is going to fail and doing something about it, is infinitely better than having one crash in the middle of writing an article. Backing up one's hard drive and possibly replacing it are far better options than recovering a failed drive.

For more information about S.M.A.R.T., please see this document by IBM: http://www.ca.pc.ibm.com/files/smartfin.pdf

About Belarc
Belarc's products allow our licensees to build direct, targeted, branded channels to their end-users based on their end-users' personal and PC profiles. These systems maintain the privacy of the visitor while delivering content personalized to each visitor. The Company has initially targeted the PC hardware and software market, and its products are licensed by some of the leading Internet PC sites, such as Ziff-Davis' ZDNet, Kingston Technology, Western Digital, Insight Direct, NECX and YourPC. For more information on Belarc, please go to: http://www.belarc.com

About YourPC
YourPC is a web site for end-users of PC systems looking to upgrade and keep their systems current. For more about YourPC, please go to: http://yourpc.net

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For additional information, please contact:

Sumin Tchen
Belarc, Inc.
Tel: 978-897-2105
Email: sumin@belarc.com
Web: http://www.belarc.com

Notes: (1) These are sample S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Each drive uses its own set of attributes to measure its S.M.A.R.T. status.

Head flying height data
Throughput performance
Spin-up time
Re-allocated sector count
Seek error rate
Seek time performance
Spin try recount
Drive calibration retry count