It is always nice to know when a physical hard disk is about to fail. The SMART status of a drive in Windows is the best way to know that there is potentially a problem comming up, SMART will often be the first sign of a drive failure, but Windows is yet to provide a great way of telling you what SMART is trying to tell it.

Another issue, is through Disk Manager and Device Manager, it can be difficult to get the serial number of a disk, leading to difficulty in identifying the disk that is failing when you do go to replace it.

I discovered that WMI actually can provide a very good interface with the SMART status, as well as a great mechanism for getting the serial number of a disk as well!

I created a script using my usual template, with the following in the body. I have scheduled this script to run hourly.