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- Quick specs
- Price: Free
- Operating system: Mac OS X 10.5 Intel, Mac OS X 10.5 PPC, Mac OS X 10.6
- Date added: October 15, 2009
- Total Downloads: 1,334
- Downloads last week: 28
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- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 4 votes
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CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: Jason Parker on May 27, 2009
You can't predict every hard-drive failure. But when a drive goes down because certain hardware components are slowly degrading, then S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) can help warn you of an impending crash, so you have time to run a backup. Mac OS X already uses S.M.A.R.T. to track the health of drives, but it only runs a check whenever you use Disk Utility to verify a disk. SMARTReporter is a free, open-source tool that checks the S.M.A.R.T. status of drives hourly (by default, or at any interval you set). SMARTReporter can display a menu bar icon to let you know your drive's status (green or red), and it can also show an alert, send you an e-mail, and even execute an application if it detects a problem.
Because of the limitations of S.M.A.R.T., SMARTReporter won't catch every impending failure (and unfortunately, it is also limited by OS X to checking ATA, SATA, and eSATA drives, not Firewire or SCSI), but this app can provide a very helpful warning for many types of failures. Note: if you're a current user on OS X 10.3 or 10.4, you'll have to update to this newer version manually, since auto-updating was disabled for older platforms.
Publisher's description
From Julian Mayer :SMARTReporter is an application that can warn you of some hard disk drive failures before they actually happen! It does so by periodically polling the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard disk drive. S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a technology built into most modern hard disk drives that acts as an "early warning system" for pending hard disk drive problems. SMARTReporter can notify you of impending hard disk drive failures by sending e-mails, displaying a warning dialog or executing an application. The current status of your hard disk drives is always displayed through the customizable menu item. Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA, SATA or eSATA hard disk drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your FireWire hard disk drive, send feedback to Apple. Please note that a S.M.A.R.T. alert doesn't mean that your HDD will completely fail for sure, nor can S.M.A.R.T. catch all possible HDD errors - it's just a very valuable indicator.
What's new in this version:
Fix a problem introduced in 2.4.1, annoying messages would be printed into the logfile dozens of times
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User reviews
- Average user rating: 0 stars Not yet available
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Showing 3 of 3 user reviewsSee all 3 user reviews
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Version: SMARTReporter 2.4.2
"Does its job - can't ask for more"
Pros: Although it was Time Machine that really saved the day when my hard drive died, SMARTReported did its job and warned me that the hard drive was on the way out.
Cons: Doesn't work for Firewire drives. Doesn't tell you why the hard drive is dying.
Summary: Since it's free, it's well worth the asking price and very cheap early warning.
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Version: SMARTReporter 2.4.2
Pros: I've used it before and was never sure if it was going to help
Cons: I can't use it now as I'm rubbing a mirrored RAID set and SMART doesn't support that
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Version: SMARTReporter 2.4.2
"I have been using this since it first became available."
Pros: Simple, easy to understand interface. If your little icon is green, everything is OK; if your icon is not, then you have advance warning that your hard drive may fail in the near future. I installed this shortly after mine did!
Cons: I have not found any yet but nothing is without its detractors.
Summary: I feel I need it; some may not. History will prove whether or not it is true.
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