S.M.A.R.T. - What's the deal?
 

What are the advantages/disadvantages to enabling this option on drives.

I am currently running a six hard drive setup on an Athlon XP system.
Mainly concerned how this will help/hinder performance.

Makes your hard drive smarter :p

It does hinder performance. but if you are worried about a drive going bad, it is supposed to give you advanded warning so you can backup your data.

my SMART harddrive keeps telling me it's going to die soon. It has been saying that for the past two years...

so it's not all perfect. :)

My SMART told me that my hd was about to die last month so I downloaded Active SMART to see what was wrong and it turned out that my error read rate was all out of whack, but a couple of days later, it went back to normal and I haven't gotten that warning since o_O

Yeah, SMART doesn't seem to be that reliable. I've seen cases where it would alert on an impending problem and nothing ever happened, and I've seen a case where it alerted about 3 minutes before the drive died.

It does cause the machine to poll the drive, so it can impact performance.