Drive Genius and Techtool Pro can not only monitor but also repair your drive (though no software utility can repair a problem with the drive’s hardware). And iStat Menus reports a whole lot more about your Mac-it tracks how your CPU is being used, shows memory allocation, a network graph relaying information about sent and received data, includes a temperature sensor, and provides detailed information on your portable Mac’s battery.Īnd then you can turn to the Big Guns-ProSoft Engineering’s $99ĭrive Genius 3 or Micromat’s $50 (currently on sale for $30) status, but, in regard to drives, it can report how much of their capacity is being used as well as their read and write statistics. It not only monitors your ATA, SATA, and eSATA drives’ S.M.A.R.T. This adds the ability to check for data I/O errors that may indicate a problem. Version 3 of SMARTReporter (pictured above). status.įor $5, however, you can have the fully-supported IStat Menus makes it easy to monitor your drives’ S.M.A.R.T. This version is out of date and unsupported by the developer, though it works perfectly well with Mountain Lion. test it issues a warning-a Growl notification, alert dialog, launches an application, or sends an email message. It monitors your drives from time to time throughout the day and if it detects a failed S.M.A.R.T.

USB, FireWire, and SCSI hard drives can’t report S.M.A.R.T. Launch the application and it places an icon in your Mac’s menu bar that indicates the health of your ATA, SATA, or eSATA drives (including internal SSD drives). Starting with the least expensive (as in “free”), CoreCode has a free version of its

Fortunately there are utilities you can use to automatically monitor it. You can later replace the failing internal drive if you care to.Īs for your second question, I agree, launching Disk Utility each day to check your drive’s integrity would be tiresome. That way you not only have a complete backup of your failing drive, but you also have a drive you can boot and work from.

At the very least, get an external hard drive and clone the failing drive to it using a utility such as In either case, given how inexpensive storage is, I wouldn’t ignore the problem.

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