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Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

I've been tasked to sell some of our inventory of old Macs. This include some PowerPC based PowerBooks, a few G5 dual core Power Macs, but mostly they're going to be MacBook Pro's, iMacs, and Mac Mini's. I'm paying most attention to the Intel stuff because most of the PPC stuff is just getting a little too old. NOTE: I am not on here to announce a sale. Please do not ask me where, when, and if the units will be sold. I don't want this thread turning into a spam-fest!


Most of the Intel units have CoreDuo processessors, some of the mini's I believe actually have Core Solo. These are all being upgraded to new systems, as you might guess. All units have their original software because when these are given to an employee to use we take the software and lock it in a file cabinet, which prevents them from losing it or doing something else with it. We have fairly tight control over our machines. I do not believe any of these units are capable of running Lion or later OSes due to their processors. Most systems are running Leopard or Snow Leopard.


In any case, we can do basic hardware tests on the units using AHT, but AHT seems to have little or no testing capability for doing surface scans on hard drives or optical drives. These are, ironically, the most likely things that will break. We want it verified these are in working order because we will be offering a limited warranty on them.


What's available for testing hard drives and optical drives?


As an FYI, having Apple do this testing is out of the question due to cost.

Posted on Sep 28, 2013 6:29 PM

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169 replies

Jul 15, 2015 12:22 PM in response to ThomasB2010

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.

Jul 17, 2015 11:35 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

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.

Jul 17, 2015 6:34 PM in response to ThomasB2010

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/


.

Jul 19, 2015 12:06 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

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….

Jul 22, 2015 11:01 AM in response to ThomasB2010

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?

Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

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