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The S.M.A.R.T. Firmware not only detects failing sectors on a SATA or any hard drive, but this feature can move data from bad sectors to healthier sectors on the drive. Yottamaster 2.5' USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure for 2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD [High Speed, Tool-Free, Supports UASP. The S.M.A.R.T. Firmware not only detects failing sectors on a SATA or any hard drive, but this feature can move data from bad sectors to healthier sectors on the drive.
I have a WD Elements drive that I use for Time Machine backups, I used Disk Utility to verify the disk, it found errors and I tried repairing it, which failed, so I reformatted the drive and it appears to be working for now... However when I attempt to verify the disk again via Disk Utility, it quickly spits back a response stating that everything is fine.
I am looking for SMART testing software that thoroughly tests the drive for errors. I checked out the downloads that WD offers for this drive but they only have this sort of diagnostic tool for Windows, whereas I need one for Mac OS X Lion. Every SMART diagnostic tool I have come across states that it supports Leopard/Snow Leopard.
Can anyone help me out here? Thanks in advance.
3 Answers
I think I'd have to agree and disagree with both of the other previous posters, more or less.
What you did was you likely had a sector go bad on your drive, so you reformatted it and during this process the bad sector got remapped to a spare sector.
Of the tools mentioned, as far as I'm concerned, Scannerz is probably the best hard drive tool on the market. It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. It analyzes both the drive surface and mechanicals, and provides warnings that point out problems other miss. It is NOT new, it's almost 2 years old I think and I noticed it went up in price. They used to have a USB launchable version that I guess they got rid of.
I wouldn't dismiss SMART reporting and 'Smart Reporter' is, like Kurt said, a good choice. There are some SMART reporters out there that are commercial and flat out don't work. One of them actually interprets SMART data erroneously. I wouldn't be terribly alarmed if a SMART report showed some errors, but it shouldn't be misinterpreting them or reporting false errors.
Smart Status Fail
A lot of the tools on the market for drives are getting really pretty old and they're outdated, and some of them appear to do nothing more than serve as interfaces to utilities that have long been on the OS. I'd say a good suite for handling problems would be:
a. Scannerz for hard drive scanning.b. SMART Reporter for SMART evaluationc. Disk Warrior for fixing indexing problems.
Disk Warrior hasn't been mentioned yet, and I don't even know if people still have indexing problems on their drives. I haven't for years, but some people swear by it.
Here's a couple tools that I've used for SMART on OSX Lion, both of which will do at a minimum SMART tests. The second is a full suite, of diagnostic and optimization tools.
General SMART utility - Smart Reporter
Full featured disk repair utility - Drive Genius 3
Check out Scannerz at http://www.scsc-online.com. Scannerz is a new tool that's supposed to be hardware oriented. It can not only do the regular surface scan other tools do, but it also has test procedures in the manual to help isolate problems that appear to be drive related but are in fact related to cabling or the drives control circuitry itself.
I was having problems with erratic behavior on a Firewire drive and other tools would give me a 'pass' on one test, then a 'fail' on another. The Scannerz users manual told me how to use the tool to evaluate the the system. Turned out the Firewire cable had an intermittent contact or break in it.
SMART, by the way isn't, IMHO, very good. It's erratically implemented across the board. I have an old Titanium with a 100G internal IDE drive that gets used for e-mail and light web work. The SMART software I use has been telling me that the drive is about to fail any minute....it's been telling me that for 3 years now. This is really an old klunker machine that gets used for odds and ends, so if the drive goes I don't care, but I was greatly surprised that several SMART implementations have been warning me so long about such a non-event.
Also, on Macs, SMART won't work on external drives, only internal drives. At least that's the way it is with USB and Firewire. Maybe it's different for Thunderbolt I/O. You might want to check the Wikipedia write up on SMART.
Hope that helps.
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My MacBook Pro (described below) fell 5 feet while it was powered on. Would the sudden motion sensor be able to turn off the hard drives in time? Also, can anyone recommend the best (free) hard drive diagnostic tools Mac OS X?
Thanks, Chirag
hairboat♦4 Answers
I assume you are aware of the Shareware tools (Like the five mentioned in this article).
In any case, since you want the free option, you will have to rely in your common sense and the tools you have (this is also true for the Shareware options, which really don’t seem to add much at this stage). Most of the benefit of TechTool Pro and DiskWarrior is to have am emergency plan in place in case of hard drive failure. But that is to be done before the problem :)
Smart Status Bad
Back to your case, I suggest you give Onyx a try to check the status of your HDD’s Smart status. Assuming you don’t hear strange noises in the drive, performing a full Clone to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner would provide you with an important piece of information: the computer can read your entire drive, block by block.
Both Onyx and OS X can verify your volume so I suggest you also perform a verify (using Disk Utility for example) and verify your permissions.
Finally, use AppleJack to execute some of the above tests to make sure that the OS is in Single User.
If after performing all of the above, you see nothing “out of the ordinary”, you don’t hear “strange click noises” or you don’t detect any strange slowness in your drive, you can assume that the drive has not suffered any damage.
But, all things said, I’d keep my backups up2date just in case. (You do have backups, don’t you?)
I’ve had drives fall from a desktop to the floor and survive for years without any problems, and some drives tipped 0.5 inches and instantly died. Hard drives are like unicorns. :)
oa-
Martin Marconcini
About the only 'free' tool that's worth anything is smartmontools, IMHO.
smartmontools is a free SMART monitoring application that comes from the Unix, BSD, and Linux world (OS X is based on BSD). This tool can provide extensive SMART monitoring but it's command line which a lot of people don't like. Everything else costs money - I suppose some people have actual costs, like food, water, heat, mortgage, etc. etc.
ZVH, over on MacRumors, has written a list of drive testing tools but beware most of these cost money:
Mac hard drive test software - creating the definitive list
- Disk Utility, diskutil (FREE, comes with OS)
- Smartmon Tools (FREE, Open Source)
- SMARTReporter ($4.95 for commercial version, but an older version is FREE)
- Scannerz Lite ($21.95)
- Scannerz with Phoenix and FSE-Lite ($39.95)
- Disk Tools Pro ($79.99)
- Disk Warrior ($99.00)
- Drive Genius ($99.00)
- TechTool Pro ($99.99)
Check Smart Status Mac
That's actually a really good report. Interesting that nearly no one commented on it. In any case, I think you get what you pay for. Tools like Disk Warrior and Scannerz are known to do very limited things but do an extraordinarily good job of doing it, while other 'Swiss Army Knife' tools apparently do a decent job, but not really all that thorough. The author only identifies a few applications as 'free.'
Although I find SMART status useful, I wouldn't base my life around SMART reports and would recommend that people do web searches about the reliability of SMART testing before using it as a defacto standard.
Graham MilnIf you haven't already, you should pop open Disk Utility, select your drive, and click the Info button. Ensure that the SMART status is 'Verified'.
Of course if you hear any audible clicking or anything of the sort, then you'll likely want to order a new HDD now (then again, I figure you haven't heard any clicking, and are wanting to check the health of the drive to ensure it is okay).
Sounds like your best recourse would be to pull the hard drive and test it in a Windows Machine, or dual-boot Windows on your Mac. Software that's actually useful, like Seatools, which does far more than Smart Monitoring, and is far better than the sub-standard disk utility built into Mac.