If QRecall reports that the S.M.A.R.T. status of an archive volume has failed, then the future of that drive is gloomy.
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is an industry standard feature built into to most modern magnetic drives. It's purpose is to report various indicators of drive reliability in an attempt to portend serious failures in the near future.
This does not mean it will fail in the near future, only that it is statistically more likely to fail than a similar drive that is not reporting any S.M.A.R.T. failures.
QRecall checks the S.M.A.R.T. status (if available) of the physical drive each time it begins an operation on an archive.
If QRecall has reported S.M.A.R.T. errors, then you should treat that as a sign the drive is unreliable in the long term. Recent studies indicate that a drive reporting a S.M.A.R.T. failure is about 40 times more likely to fail in the next 60 days than a drive that does not report any failures.
This would be a good time to review your disaster recovery scenarios and have a plan to migrate your existing archive data to another device, or at least have a spare drive on hand to replace it.
When QRecall encounters a S.M.A.R.T. failure, it normally cancels the action. If you absolutely must continue using the archive, you will need to modify this behavior in the advanced settings.
The S.M.A.R.T. Check (QRCheckSMARTStatus) setting can be set to:
So if QRecall hasn't report any S.M.A.R.T. status failures, then everything is A-OK, right?
Sorry, but that's not the case.
Not all drives support S.M.A.R.T. and not all drive enclosures support S.M.A.R.T. So QRecall may not be able to check the status of your drive.
Some RAIDs support S.M.A.R.T.; others won't report their S.M.A.R.T. status to the OS, but do monitor their drives and have their own warnings. Check the specifications for your particular RAID hardware and software.
Networked volumes and NAS devices almost never report the S.M.A.R.T. status of their drives. Similar to RAID, some NAS devices will monitor the health of their drives and have custom software to notify you of any problems.
Finally, even if QRecall can read the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drive, almost one third of drives fail without ever reporting a S.M.A.R.T. error.
The bottom line is this: have a plan in place for what to do should your equipment fail. Because, some day, it will.