How to Check SMART Status on Mac Hard Drives

How to Check SMART Status on Mac Hard Drives

Mac users can easily check the SMART status of their hard drives and internal disk storage by using Disk Utility in Mac OS, offering a simple way to see if the disk hardware itself is in good health or is experiencing a hardware issue. This article will walk you through , and it works with both SSD and HDD volumes. Checking SMART status of a drive can give you actionable information about whether a disk is about to fail and therefore is in need of an urgent data backup and drive replacement. SMART, which stands for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology System, is a mechanism for reporting disk health or disk problems to the operating system, and SMART status can tell you if a drive is failing or has some other fatal error to the actual disk hardware, providing a very clear indicator that its time to urgently backup all important data and then replace the failing drive. As you can imagine, SMART status of a disk is quite important, and if you want to know whether a disk is about to fail then checking SMART status is perhaps one of the simplest and easiest ways to know. This trick works the same on all modern versions of MacOS and Mac OS System software with the Disk Utility application. Heres how it works: because the disk drive will soon cease to function entirely, leading to permanent data loss. Its a good habit to or another backup option anyway, but its extra important to immediately backup if you see any failing message pertaining to SMART Status or any other fatal error in the Disk Utility app. You can also run First Aid and on the Mac, but issues that are repairable by Disk Utility are almost never SMART failures or any other hardware problem. If you are experiencing strange disk issues but the SMART Status reports as Verified with no error messages, then you can try and , or with or the . Having a routine of checking, verifying, and repairing a disk, as well as backing up the Mac, are that should be followed anyway. If the disk or drive is not showing up in Disk Utility at all, and youre looking at Disk Utility from another volume or boot drive, that suggests either one of the following: the drive has already failed, is periodically failing and will soon completely fail, or at best the disk is somehow not connected physically (highly unlikely but vaguely possible that an internal connection came loose). Note that not all external drives and external disk enclosures include support for SMART status, so some volumes may not report any SMART finding or information. * The actual disk drives usually have a name that is related to the manufacturer of the disk itself. For the example, APPLE SSD SM0512G Media would be the drive, whereas Macintosh HD would be a partition on that drive, thus youd want to select the APPLE SSD SM0512G option rather than any partition. ** The simplest way to . It is absolutely critical to backup a failing disk, as not doing so can and will result in permanent data loss. If you are not sure what to do, contact an authorized Apple Support center or official Apple Support. A failing disk is a hardware problem and indicates the drive itself must be replaced with a new disk. Do you know of any other helpful tips for checking SMART status, or examining hard drive issues or checking for an impending disk failure in Mac OS? Share your own tools, tips, and experiences in the comments below!