Q: Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

Anyone know if this kext driver issue exists in El Capitan? I have yet to understand some of the security features I've read about.

When the drive is in an enclosure, you are talking and sending commands to the controller built into the enclosure.

If the controller in the enclosure supports SMART, you get to see it, otherwise not. This is not a deficiency in the Mac OS X Drivers.

SMART is of extremely limited value anyway -- drives are often fall-out dead before SMART says there might be problem.

Thank you Grant, but the issue with the drivers has to do with some of the security features in Yosemite, which has to do with kext signing. The security in El Capitan, which I haven't had much of a chance to look at is apparently different and I wondered if the problems would still exist.

I would agree, however, that SMART isn't worth that much. I figured if it was Apple would have been monitoring drives on USB and FireWire drives years ago.

kext signing

Apple has finally relented on TRIM for third-party drives.

Mac OS X 10.10.4 supports TRIM for third-party SSD drives

and cindori software says the new features added to support this, plus some new work on their part, allows them to enable TRIM without disabling kext signing in 10.10.3 and later.

https://www.cindori.org/safely-enable-trim-on-yosemite-and-el-capitan/

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I guess for some (newer Yosemite and El Capitan users) there's no longer any need for Trim Enabler…that's the way I read that.

Regardless of what people think of SMART and the SAT drivers, it remains questionable whether the drivers will work with Yosemite and beyond without disabling kext signing. The SAT drivers are open source so there's likely no rush to get a new set of them pushed out and the online instructions still say that you need to set the nvram to allow unsigned kext extensions. Oh well….

Personally I wouldn't bother with checking the SMART status of an external drive unless it was being used constantly as a boot drive. Most people use them as secondary data drives or backup drives and they're asleep a lot of time anyway. Note that I said "Most people" not all people. Most third party drive makers have applications, utilities, or drivers that can report on the SMART status for you. Why even fool around with drivers that violate the system setup?

People seem to be confusing the SAT SMART driver with the TRIM enabler. The link above from Grant Bennet-Alder is regarding enabling TRIM. I believe that you still need to disable kext signing in Yosemite if you want to use the SAT SMART drivers.

Anyone know if kext signing is or is supposed to be used in El Capitan?

If you do a search for kext signing it looks like it's a developing process, so yes it will be enforced in Yosemite and I assume future OS releases as well. You should read Apple's own documentation because some of the stuff related to this is tied to non-disclosure agreements.

Will some of these new security features cause some test tools or even applications from running at all? It's sort of beginning to sound like OS X is headed towards the same sort of restrictions found on a iPhone.

I hope not! That would kill the Mac.

I agree. I know that our database people have some stuff installed in some of the lower level directories like /usr/bin and maybe even /bin, and I know they are (or were) modifying stuff in /etc. If they can't do that any longer or in the future, they'll probably have switch to a Linux system.

All of this stuff can be disabled, so it's not like it's the end of the world. If Apple gets enough complaints or it causes too many problems I'm sure they'll make the needed changes.

Stuff like SAT SMART drivers and even TRIM enablers are sort of obscure things to most people, hence I'm not sure there's a big demand for these types of changes. Problems with TRIM have already been dealt with the latest releases, so that's not even an issue.