SMART Utility is a very useful tool designed to scan the internal hardware diagnostics system of hard drives.
SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a system built into hard drives by their manufacturers to report on various measurements(called attributes) of a hard drive`s operation.
The attributes can be used to detect when a hard drive is having mechanical or electrical problems, and can indicate when the hard drive is dying. This allows time to hopefully backup, and then replace the drive.
Each manufacturer implements a different number of attributes, but most implement some common ones. They include temperature and bad sectors (bad areas on the drive).
There are thresholds for each of these attributes, and if the measurement will drop below the threshold, the overall SMART status will automatically indicate failure.
However, some of these attributes, such as bad sectors, can indicated a failing hard drive before the threshold is reached. Unlike Disk Utility, and other drive utilities, which only check the overall SMART status, SMART Utility checks the individual attributes and indicates when a drive is failing.
SMART Utility is based on the command line "smartmontools", an open source software package that does the actual scanning of SMART attributes. SMART Utility only parses the data that smartmontools outputs, and it would not exist without it.
Here are some key features of "SMART Utility":
· Displays all supported drives and their partitions
· Displays important information in the main window, such as drive model, capacity, power on hours, temperature, bad sector counts, and error counts and types
· Displays easy to read overall SMART status with color coded text
· Displays more detailed information in separate windows, including capabilities, all available attributes, and the past five errors
· Displays information using the Growl notification service (if installed)
· Supports scanning in the background
· Supports running a hard drive`s built-in test, and displays the results of the test
· Supports scanning OS X software RAID drives, as well as drives in many RAID enclosures and cards (including SeriTek drives)
· Supports logging all information to a log file for verifying SMART data
· Supports customizing the pre-fail algorithm, including only alerting new bad sectors and error counts
· Supports Mac OS X 10.4.11, 10.5 or later, including 10.6, and both PowerPC and Intel Macs
· Fully localized in French, thanks to Ronald A. Leroux
Limitations:
· 30 days or 5 launches trial.
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Fixed a serious bug that would cause a crash when rescanning drives
· Fixed a bug that occurs when launching from the command line
· Fixed a bug that caused inaccurate drive capacity display
· Fixed a bug that caused the menu extra icon to not be masked when clicked on
· Fixed a bug that caused the menu extra to show unsupported drives
· Fixed a bug that cause the menu extra to pass the wrong icon to Growl for failing and failed drives
· Updated Growl framework to 1.2.2, which fixes some bugs
