Nursing the hard disk – SMARTReporter for Mac OS X
Posted on February 10, 2009 by admin
Sometimes among the jungle of different free programs I can spot those that appear to me – an ordinary user – unattractive. However, such programs are needed in an emergency when it is already too late. That concerns all applications for analyzing and controlling your Mac in case of emerging signs of impending hardware failures. One of the guardians that guards the correct functioning of a fairly significant component of our hardware – hard disk drives is a free program SMARTReporter written by Julian Mayer.
SMARTReporter controls SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) hard drives in the Mac, respectively under guidance of the program are ATA drives, SATA and eSATA (SCSI and FireWire drives are not supported by the SMART technology implemented into Mac OS X).
SMARTReporter enables wide configuration of its behavior in case of errors on the disk or the possibility of failure. In addition to the standard message (alert) another program may also be chosen to run, e-mail notification message (which can be useful if you administer more Macs, operated by a ordinary users). We can also decide what information will appear in the sent e-mail alert. In case you are working on MacBook (or other Apple laptops) SMARTReporter offers the ability to limit its work to the time when the laptop is connected to the electricity network – this allows us to work safely while traveling without the danger of running out of power. Application nests in the menu bar and its icon inform us about the state of our hard disks. I hope that never turn its color to red.
The program is available at: http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/index.html
Comments (3)
I don’t like to have a lot of small apps active… they make my system slower. I usually use onyx (once a week) and it checks SMART of my hdd.
Have you ever tried it?
Yes i did… what would you do if your disk failed just one day before your scheduled Onyx run?
Absolutely perfect! Spent several hours a few days ago looking around for something just like this for both the Pro and MB Pro but never happened upon this one. Much appreciated find.
I use Onyx weekly as well, but as admin points out … a continuous monitor could save some serious heartache.