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s.m.a.r.t

What to do about SMART errors in OS X

One error you might run into when attempting to install OS X on your computer is a claim by the installer that the hard drive has SMART errors and will not allow you to install to the selected drive. When this happens, the system will claim the drive cannot be repaired and recommend you back it up as soon as possible and replace the disk.

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (aka, SMART) is a feature built into hard disks to monitor the heath status of the drives and provide the system with a method to detect an impending failure or … Read more

Keep your hard drive up to speed

Drive Genius is a hard-working hard-drive utility from longtime Mac developers Prosoft Engineering, with the honorable distinction of being employed at the Apple Store Genius Bar as part of their ProCare Yearly Tune Up service.

The interface of Drive Genius shares some similarities with that of its data-recovery sister program Data Rescue: you navigate through a 3D "tool arena," a sort of virtual lazy Susan of hard-drive tasks that's fast and fluid enough to not be annoying (and it's actually kind of fun). You choose from six primary tasks, Information (with detailed readouts on S.M.… Read more

Featured Freeware: SMARTReporter

You can't predict every hard-drive failure. But when a drive goes down because certain hardware components are slowly degrading, then Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, aka S.M.A.R.T., can help warn you of an impending crash so you have time to run a backup.

Mac OS X already uses S.M.A.R.T. to track the health of drives, but it only runs whenever you use Disk Utility to verify a disk. SMARTReporter is an open-source tool that checks the S.M.A.R.T. status of drives hourly, or at any interval you set. … Read more