If there’s one thing that strikes fear into my Mac heart, it’s a hard disk drive that’s about ready to go bad. Why the fear? Because my Mac has almost 500 gigabytes of files—movies, music, TV shows, photos, documents, files, PDFs, utilities, applications, games.
A bad hard drive is a sweaty headache. Is there a way to know when your Mac’s hard disk drive is about to kick the bucket, buy the farm, cross the river Styx, go belly up, dance the last dance, go into the fertilizer business? Yes. And no. It’s that easy.
When Moving Parts Stop Moving
Macs today don’t have many moving parts. Keyboard. Mouse. Um, hard disk drive. Fan. SuperDrive. Even fewer moving parts on the MacBook Air models.
Of all the inexpensive, easily replaced, prone to breakage parts, only the hard disk drive’s death makes brave men perspire.
That’s because your Mac’s disk drive is where all your stuff is. When it goes it goes one of two ways. Your Mac begins acting up, doing strange things, taking a long time to boot up, or a long time to open an app or file, and so on.
Or, nothing happens at all. You sit down, fire up your Mac and nothing happens. That’s not a fun time for any Mac user. Fortunately, hard disk drives are better designed, better constructed, last longer, cost less than ever, ever before.
The S.M.A.R.T. In Your Mac
Your Mac’s hard disk drive probably comes with a built-in warning system called S.M.A.R.T. (which means Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). Basically, it monitors your Mac’s drive for various and sundry indicators that may spelling impending disaster.
SMARTReporter is a Mac utility which runs all the time, constantly monitoring the S.M.A.R.T status in your Mac’s hard disk drive. Installation puts a little colored disk icon in your Mac’s Menubar. Let the polling begin.
Simply select the Mac hard disk drive you want SMARTReporter to monitor. If it finds a failure or problem, you can be notified with an alert, run an application, or send you an email notice.
The Appearance preferences are straightforward, too. Display or not display in the Menubar, change the icon set.
Finally, set the Behavior to start SMARTReport on login, stop checking disks when the Mac notebook battery is on, and check for updates.
If all goes well, then SMARTReporter will let you know when it finds a problem. You can change the polling interval to seconds or minutes, as needed.
Is SMARTReporter Really THAT Smart?
Yes. And no. Hard disk drives fail in two basic ways. Predictable failures. Unpredictable failures. But even unpredictable failures may provide some S.M.A.R.T notification before failing, well, unpredictably.
The idea is to get some notification, some warning that a problem has occurred, because, sooner or later, without fail, your hard disk drive will fail.
SMARTReporter simply reads what S.M.A.R.T provides, and notifies you accordingly. If your disk drive reaches certain thresholds of performance, you get a notification, whether it be a slowdown, inability to read or write certain sectors, whatever.
It’s been my experience with many hundreds of hard disk drives over the past few years that SMARTReporter works about 65-percent of the time. Your mileage may vary. Some disk drives just plain die without any warning at all. It happens.
Since using SMARTReporter doesn’t require any additional effort, won’t do anything to your hard disk drive, and is free, that’s 65-percent additional protection than you had without it. It’s a little more protection for little additional effort and no additional cost.
About Jeffrey Mincey
The hard drive on my iMac 27″ i7 failed. I was backing up with two external USB drives with SuperDuper. There were backup errors, “can not find file” and disk full errors. This occurred over several weeks, then the drive failed. The backups were not bootable probably because of the copy errors. Apple replaced the hard drive under warranty and included a Snow Leopard install image which required a Lion download from Apple. Migration Assistant could not transfer files or Applications from the external hard drives. The Safari bookmarks were recovered by synchronizing with XMarks. The data and applications are still on the externals but ordered DiskWarrior to attempt to make the drives bootable. If that works I will boot from the external and use SuperDuper to replace the info on the internal drive. There was an option in Migration Assistant to backup from Time Machine, not sure if that would have solved my problem. An interesting observation is the 23,000 photos imported from the external drive in iPhoto are now over 130,000. Lots of duplicates. Once this is sorted out, there will be a backup with SuperDuper and to Time Machine.
Love this app. It works great about two out of three times. Most drives going bad start to send out signals– slow startup, slow app startup, slow file saving. SMARTreporter is worth it because two out of three isn’t bad. But sometimes hard disks just die without warning.
Oh, backup, backup, backup. And test your SuperDuper backups from time to time., just to make they’re really super.