Looks like Self Monitoring Analysis and Real Time Reporting Technology (SMART) is now available in Compact Flash as well.  SMART has been around for many years and is usually available in magnetic hard drive. Almost all hard drive in the market now  has SMART and can easily be enabled via your motherboard BIOS.  Not sure how SMART is going to be enabled for CF.  Basically, SMART provides a standard method for checking the health of mass-storage devices whilst Error Correction Code (ECC) verifies the datastream to catch and correct any errors. 

Hopefully, we will have SMART in all our removable medias in future ... nowadays, the flash drive is not as good as the older ones.  I have data failure occasionally on my new TwinMOS SD that I bought a couple of months back.  I also have bad experience of failure with my Pendrive flash drive after the warranty expires ... :(.

Press release: 

RIDATA SMART Compact Flash Card

Featuring Self-Monitoring Analysis and Real Time Reporting Technology to Monitor CF Card Status.

1/2/2008 – Diamond Bar, Calif. – Advanced Media, Inc., is a manufacturer and marketer of the popular RIDATA brand of recordable CD and DVD media, electronic storage products, and digital media accessories. The company is introducing the first Smart Compact Flash™ Cards at CES 2008. Featuring high-speed access to reading and writing and up to 16GB of storage capacity, the self-monitoring CF card is ideal for virtually any flash media storage application.

“We are pleased to introduce the RIDATA SMART CompactFlash Card, which is the first of its kind in the industry,” stated Harvey Liu, Advanced Media president. “The flash memory market is growing quickly due to the number of new applications that use flash media for storage. As capacity continues to increase, RIDATA saw the need for an internal data monitoring system to ensure the safety of your data.”

The new rugged, reliable, RIDATA memory cards are available in two series of "Supreme 150X (up to 8GB capacity-SLC format)" and "Lightning (up to 16GB MLC format)". It features innovative functionalities such as Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology so users can easily monitor the CF card’s status. The card is capable of providing notification to users in real time to protect vital information and data.

Reliability and Endurance
The new Smart Card offers long-term reliability and endurance with a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 5,000,000 powered-on hours. It also offers maximum endurance of 100,000 times of program/erase cycles. Its embedded Error Correction Code (ECC) supports two random bits of a sector on-the-fly ECC corrections.

Compatibilities
Ridata’s Smart Card conforms to the CompactFlash Association Standard, the PC Card standard and is PC Card ATA and true IDE Mode compatible. It is also host ATA disk I/O BIOS DOS/Windows file system, utilities and application software compatible. The controller supports Ultra DMA Mode to Mode 4. Also supported is CIS implemented with 256 bytes of attributed memory. Lastly it supports 8 or 16 bit host transfers with any host speed using Input/Output channel ReaDY (IORDY).

Power Savings
Another feature of the RIDATA Smart CompactFlash™ Card is its low power consumption. In standby mode with an automatic power management function, users acquire longer battery life from a digital camera or other device. The non-volatile card requires no power to store data, but requires a 3.3V/5V single power supply to read and write data.

File Systems
Regarding the 4GB, 8GB and 16GB CF cards, users should use the cards on devices that support a FAT32 file system. Some older devices only support FAT16 file system and these systems have a maximum capacity of a 2GB CF card. Please refer to the owner’s manual for the device’s file system compatibility.