Operating as either a menu-bar indicator or background-only process, SMARTReporter monitors the status of all supported drives connected to your Mac. However, a more economical-but just as effective-option is one that my colleague Rob Griffiths mentioned earlier this year: Julian Mayer’s free ( donations accepted). Some, such as Alsoft’s and Micromat’s, are commercial, multi-function disk utilities that include SMART-monitoring functionality. I think you get my point.) Luckily, there are a few third–party utilities that automate this process for you by periodically checking the SMART status of your drive(s) and alerting you if a problem is detected. (You could also use Terminal to check, but the same limitation applies-you still have to do it manually or, if you’re skilled at Unix, set up a script that does it periodically. And who’s really going to do this on a regular basis? But this means that you have to manually check your drives. Granted, if you launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) and select a drive in the volume list on the left, you’ll see, at the bottom of the window, the drive’s SMART status-'Verified” if everything is OK.
Smartreporter mac mac os x#
Unfortunately, Mac OS X is a bit lacking in this respect. So most computers provide some sort of SMART-monitoring feature.
Smartreporter mac software#
It requires software on the host computer that actively communicates with the drive’s SMART system and reports its status to you.
(If the drive is still under warranty, many drive/computer manufacturers will replace the drive based solely on a “failed” SMART test.) There’s just one problem with SMART-it’s useless on its own. Smartreporter Mac Fullīut it’s a useful tool that can significantly decrease your chances of falling victim to data loss: If the SMART system indicates problems, you should back up your important data and then consider replacing the drive. This system, called (for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology ) can’t detect every problem for example, it’s better suited to identifying gradual performance degradation and increases in the number of read/write errors than it is at predicting instantaneous, catastrophic failure, and it won’t detect software issues such as a corrupt disk directory.
So most hard drives these days also include a system of sensors that monitors various parameters of the drive’s performance and can provide the results to the host computer. Still, this overall reliability is little consolation if you happen to be one of the unlucky few who falls victim to a “bad” drive.
Smartreporter mac for mac os x#
SMARTReporter Lite is a free application for Mac OS X that can warn you of some hard disk drive failures before they actually happen! It does so by periodically.
Sure, there are lemons, but if you look at the number of hard drives out there and then consider how many people have actually had a drive fail mechanically, these things are pretty dependable. Nowadays you can get a 250GB hard drive for not much more than $100, and it’s expected to last at least five years. But drives have also gotten more reliable-even the inexpensive ones. If you’ve been using and supporting computers as long as I have, you know that just as computers have gotten faster and cheaper, so too have hard drives gotten bigger and cheaper.
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