Be warned before your hard disk fails
Ivan | Thu, 2004-07-29 16:43There is nothing more frustrating than a hard disk failure. And every HD fails at one point. It's sure as death. However, there is a technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that is built into most modern hard drives and it can give you early warning that you need to get your stuff moved to another disk. To check the SMART status of your HD you can open the Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, click on your HD icon and check the last row on the bottom right. If it says Verified than you're safe.
If you want SMART to be checked automatically download the free SMARTReporter (140K) from Julian Mayer. It can run in the background and use virtually no CPU and just 17MB of memory to periodically check your HD based on your settings. A little green icon will be sitting in your menubar telling you that all is fine and will warn you if your HD is about to fail. It's not a life saver, but could be a file saver.
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Thought I'd take a look at my drive status with Disk Utility and I don't see anything that comes close to resembling "Verified" on "the last row on the bottom left." (For any of the drives attached.)
Are you talking about the last line in the log window after running a "Verify Disk" operation, by chance??
I just added a screenshot. Hopefully that will explain it better.
Also, some very old HD's might not support SMART. BTW, I have a 2000 model Pismo Powerbook G3 with it's original HD and it is supported on that one.
Also, I was meant to say bottom right column, not bottom left. Sorry!
Interesting. Thanks for posting the screen shot. I don't have the S.M.A.R.T. status line for my external 200GB Maxtor which I believe is new enough to support SMART. (It does appear for my internal 20GB Western Digital however.)
Obviously a "Panther" thing.
Disk Utility v10.3 for OS X v10.2.8 has no such options.
Numbers can be so misleading....how does that go, again?
"Figures often lie and liars often figure."
L.A.
Both my two-week old iBook 1 Gig and four-month old iMac 1 gig show this feature on the device only (rather than the named volume), while my LaCie six-month old 160 gig firewire 400 drive doesn't. Could this be a function of internal Mac drives?
I just downloaded SMARTreporter and in the Read Me file the author notes that SMART is for ATA drives only, not SCSI or Firewire.
Interesting. Thanks
Click the BLUE Info button - it provides a bit more information. On an internal QUANTUM FIREBALLP KX10.2 (originally installed), Info reports that
"S.M.A.R.T. status : Not Supported".
On two Maxtor 96147H6 drives (added later), Info reports
"S.M.A.R.T. status : Verified".
There is no SMART status report line for a Maxtor HD in a firewire HD box.
Perhaps there is a UNIX app that reads SMART status in a firewire HD.
Fred in SF
[useless comment] i just had to chuckle at the comment about this little utility which requires "only 17MB of ram". what's that? something like 100X as much as the *total RAM* on the original mac?
(i realize that 17MB must include lots of shared libraries and such - the comment still strikes me as funny)
just 17MB :) - I know, it's kinda weird isn't it? My first 386 PC had just 128MB Hard Drive and like 2MB RAM. Now, I have 1.5GB RAM in the G5 and 768MB RAM in the Powerbook. Basically I have like ten times more RAM than the HD space I used to have back than. If this goes on in 10 years I'm gonna have like 1TB RAM in my G7. And probably no HD at all. At least not the way we know it Today.
BTW: The author of the above mentioned app writes:
"Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA/IDE hard-drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your SCSI or FireWire hard-drive, send feedback to Apple."
From: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14825
If you have DiskWarrior X, it can also test your disk drive & give you a SMART status. This makes sense, since it is a disk repair utility. Don't know if TechTool Pro / Drive 10 do this or not, but it would make sense as they are in the same category.
-- Been there. Done that. Replaced disk.
From the command line:
diskutil info device (use diskinfo list to get the device information - diskutil list)
example: (using my internal drive)
diskutil info /dev/disk0
Device Node: /dev/disk0
Device Identifier: disk0
Mount Point:
Volume Name:
Partition Type: Apple_partition_scheme
Bootable: Not bootable
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: ATA
SMART Status: Verified
Total Size: 74.5 GB
Free Space: 0.0 B
Read Only: No
Ejectable: No
OS 9 Drivers: No
Low Level Format: Not Supported
hello
i'm the author of SMARTReporter and i wanted to comment on the "SMARTReporter uses 17MB RAM" thing.
i don't know where you took that number from, but it certainly isn't true. please consider that the memory usage numbers you obtain by running "top" are completely meaningless, since they add the memory used by shared-libraries to every app using them.
the newest version 2.0b5 of SMARTReporter has considerably more features than the 1.0 version you linked, and i get those numbers:
/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app reports 3.54 MB used
/usr/bin/leaks reports 1,1 MB used
so the true memory usage of SMARTReporter likely is between 1 and 3 MB.
thanks, julian
So how much of a head's up do you think this gives you before everything goes t*ts up? A week? An hour?
there is no definite time before it fails completely, but if your hard disk doesn't verify, you have to back-up your files immediately and replace your hard drive.
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forget it - just saw everything I asked for in the uppdate. Have been runnning 1.0
Please help!!! I got a message reading "Volume Needs Repair"! How should I proceed?