Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Discover Hard Disk Drive Failiure with SMARTReporter before it hits you hard

Hard disk failiure is, sadly, common among laptops. They say everything that's moving gets worn out – so do iBooks, MacBooks, MacBook Pros etc. In the recent times disk failiure has been happening to many of my friend's machines, struck by the disaster. It is not fatal if you have a backup disk, but can you imagine a disappointment of losing 40gb iTunes Library, iPhoto and all last 2 weeks work?

Well I discovered SMARTReporter this week and installed it today. I hope it will save me lots of stress in the future. It can notify me before the real hard disk failiure actually happens so I would have time to save data.

SMARTReporter is an application that can warn you of ATA hard-drive failures before they actually happen! It does so by periodically polling the S.M.A.R.T.-status of your hard-drives. S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a technology built into most modern hard-drives that acts as an "early warning system" for pending drive problems. Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA or S-ATA hard-drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your FireWire hard-drive, send feedback to Apple.





Enjoy this small utility and configure it for e-mail notifications. Play safe and do backups! :)

PS: I got lucky last Christmas because Apple Warranty agreed to exchange my Logic Board and Hard Disk 1 day before warranty deadline, hey ;)

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