Be Warned before a Hard Disk Failure with SMARTreporter

Posted by Loren Morris on 08/8/07 in Home & Personal, Office, Utilities

Smartreporter Logo I took a vacation a couple of months ago and decided to take the MacBook. While I was away the laptop worked fine, but when I got home it was a different story. After talking with Apple support, they came to the conclusion that the hard drive had failed and all information was lost. To help prevent another catastrophe, I downloaded SMARTreporter.

SMARTreporter is a small application that runs in the menu bar and warns you before a hard disk failure. If you hard drive is working problem-free the icon will show green, but if a rough time’s ahead the icon will turn red. Fortunatley, I haven’t been blessed with another failure, but many Mac users swear by it.

If a failure is about to occur SMARTreporter can “pop-up an alert”, send an email, and even can run an application (backups, hard drive diagnostic). The best part is the application is unobtrusive and barely uses any of you computer’s much needed resources.

Once you download SMARTreporter you’ll forget about it, but it will be there if/when a problem occurs. SMARTreporter is free to download and is a must for anyone with important information on their hard drive.

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7 Comment(s)

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Miles Evans said on

August 8th, 2007 at 6:25 am

Installed. I had not heard of this app…Great suggestion and welcome aboard Loren

One comment…I wonder why it doesn’t seem to log the health of any of my external SMART enabled disks?

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niepi said on

August 8th, 2007 at 7:05 am

really usefull tool !!! i never needed it, but i hope i never have too.

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t said on

August 8th, 2007 at 8:56 am

meh, my hard drive died a slow death over several weeks, ultimately requiring a replacement and smartreporter did not once warn me. this software will only work if the hard drive’s inbuilt smart status changes which may or may not occur. in my case the status was always verified/green even though at one point i had to hold my powerbook upside down to boot properly.

Arjun Muralidharan said on

August 8th, 2007 at 9:01 am

Hmm… why not just make good backups? Time Machine will help in this respect.

I think I’d rather be prepared than rush around trying to pull of critical data when I know the drive might die any minute.

Besides, I’m not sure this thing will detect EVERY failure. The drive might as well jsut die in a blink. Then why dedicate the system resources to such a tool?

Still, good to know it exists. Thanks for the heads-up.

Loren Morris said on

August 8th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

I like that it just sits in the menu bar and doesn’t bother you.

Jamie Diamond said on

August 8th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

Too bad that every study ever done on SMART technology shows it’s pretty much useless. Good excuse for software makers to make money though.

Viktor Szathmary said on

August 8th, 2007 at 2:39 pm

In the hosting experience of the Google team (quite a few HDDs), 36% of failed HDDs did not indicate any SMART alerts. So somewhat useful, but don’t rely on it, perform backups regularly.

Reference: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf