Some of us can’t afford super fancy data robots that let us know when drives are failing. *ahem*Me*ahem*, but it doesn’t mean that their aren’t tools out there to help us keep an eye on the integrity of our drives. Disk utility is a great resource, but what I want to focus on for a moment is an application called SMART Utility. It’s very simple, and very, very handy.
Essentially the application goes out connects to your drives, then uses the SMART technology to see what drives are starting to go bad. As you can see by my attached screen capture, one of my drives is starting to fail on me. The really scary thing is that I had absolutely no idea that the drive had bad sectors, let alone that is was my primary operating system install drive. So guess what, it’s time to drop some coin on a new drive.
I shouldn’t complain, drives are dirty cheap these days. Excuse me while I go check on my backup scheme.
Some cool things the application does
The program has a number of notification options. First it’ll send you a growl update to let you know that you need to give your drives some attention. The second thing it does is change the icon in your Dock. A green flag means everything’s good, a yellow flag means you’re heading for trouble, and the red flag… well, lets hope that never happens.
So if you’re as paranoid about data loss as I am, then you need to check out the trial of this application at the very least. 25 dollars for the application seems a little bit pricey, but the first time you lose everything to a hard drive failure you’ll wish you weren’t such a cheap ass.
