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 ;)