HD For Indies

UPDATE Sunday 5/30/04: This is from a very knowledgeable reader Rui del-Negro in reference to SMART drives:

"S.M.A.R.T. won't warn you about any errors before they happen. As long as you run an error check on your drives regularly (i.e. once every couple of weeks), you'll spot the problems anyway, usually before S.M.A.R.T. does. Windows has had support for S.M.A.R.T. for 8 years or so, and I've only seen it give a warning once (and it was for a drive that I already knew was dying).

I had another 5 drives fail (three of them gradually, two catastrophically) without S.M.A.R.T. noticing anything.

If you want data about drive speeds or reliability, go to http://storagereview.com/. "


UPDATE: Here is a nice article on it.

There is a technology available for ATA and SATA drives called SMART - short for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology- available on many vendors' hard drives (such as IBM, Seagate, etc.) that allows the drive to pre-emptively tell when it's failing (from some but not all types of problems). I've heard of this technology for awhile but didn't know how to access it. Somewhere around OS 10.3.2 or 10.3.3, Apple included a line in their Disk Utility to tell SMART status - so now it will say that is either OK or failing. If failing, RIGHT NOW is the time to back up your data and never trust that drive again. I recently had this happen on the boot up drive on my old G4/867. I'd been using it as my primary email box for a couple of years, and it had 4 years worth of email, contacts, schedules, etc. on it, on top of the lengthy chunk of time it takes to get all my applications installed, configured, plug-ins installed, custom settings loaded, etc. etc. etc.

I was able to use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the drive to a disk image on another drive in the machine, swap out the old drive for a new one, then disk image the old bootup disk's content onto the new drive (while booting from a FireWire drive).

So this saved all the data from being lost if/when the drive failed in the near future.

I am going to try to not buy any drives that don't have this feature in the future - and you shouldn't either.

I need to double check, but if Disk Utility lets you check SMART status on SATA drives in an array, it's a good way to monitor the array's health, and potentially avoid data loss.

Same thing (hopefully) applies to FireWire drives as well. I saw a link on a website to a tool to check SMART status of an ATA drive mounted in a particular FireWire drive vendor's enclosure. Since these manufacturers typically are using the same bridgeboards, it might work on other vendors' enclosures as well.

But definitely something to put on your specs list when shopping from now on.

-mike