Today's Best Tech Deals
Picked by PCWorld's Editors
Top Deals On Great Products
S.m.a.r.t Tool For Windows
Picked by Techconnect's Editors
Generic Company Place Holder S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools
Forums Macs Mac Apps and Mac App Store Cannot delete S.M.A.R.T. Discussion in ' Mac Apps and Mac App Store ' started by nicolaidenmark, Oct 4, 2011. You may have noticed that S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring is only activated for your Mac internal hard drive by default. But there is a way for you to monitor the status of your external drives as well.
This is going to be a short review. Not because the free andopen source S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools aren't useful, but simplybecause they're, well, simple. Run from the command line, they tellyou everything you need to know about your hard drive's health,i.e., the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and ReportingTechnology) info and you can even instruct them to initiate yourdrive's S.M.A.R.T. self-test.
Commands are in the format smartctl -(command) -(drive). E.g.,smartctl -h sda. Notice that the command uses the Unix/Linuxprotocol for drives (sda, sdb, sdc, etc.) instead of drive letters.That's a hint at the tool's heritage.
My only, and exceedingly minor, complaint about the S.M.A.R.T.Monitoring Tools is that the information it presents is often widerthan the 80 characters that the Windows command line windowdefaults to. To alleviate this problem, increase the width of thecommand window by left-click on the 'C:' icon at the top left ofthe window, select Properties, select the Layout tab and increasethe width of the Window size to 120 or 160.
S M A R T Recovery Program
The S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools are great, and for instances inwhich you can access only a command prompt, invaluable. That said,most users will be better off with Passmark's also-free DiskCheckup,which relays the same information via a graphical interface.
--Jon L. Jacobi

S.m.a.r.t Tool Mac
Generic Company Place Holder S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools
This command-line utility informs you of your hard drive's health.
Cons
- Only available from a command prompt; info sometimes exceeds 80 characters