Health of HDD: How to check?
Hey guys, I just wanted to know if it was possible to check on the health of my Mac Mini's HDD. I just want to know if it's about to fail or not.
Thanks!
Hey guys, I just wanted to know if it was possible to check on the health of my Mac Mini's HDD. I just want to know if it's about to fail or not.
Thanks!
Boot OS X Recovery and use Disk Utility.
"About to fail" is sort of like "about to run out of gas". Hard disks will all fail, eventually. Could be today or ten years from now. Sometimes they will show symptoms of impending doom, sometimes they fail completely and catastropically with no warning whatsoever.
Having a backup seems to preclude the need to ever use it. If you don't have a backup, do it now, and verify that it is a viable recovery strategy in preparation for the day your Mini won't boot.
Go to Disk Utility and selct the HD. In the loower left is a line ite for S.M.A.R.Ts Stutsu. If anly besides Vierified is listed than the disk is OK now but could have problem tomorrow. If S.M.A.R.T. are listed the HD is very likely failing.
Or use the free software like Disk Drill: S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, I/O errors and bad sectors detection will help you determine whether your hard drive has any potential issues or not. You can also protect your data from accidental loss, undoubtfully helpful.
S.M.A.R.T. is technology that 'watches' your drive and through the use of statistical data and the drive's behavior is supposed to warn you of the imminent failure of the drive. A Google research project was published about two years ago that showed two things: 1) when your drive warns of a S.M.A.R.T. failure you shouldn't ignore it. False positives are very rare. 2) false negatives are a major problem. Google's research showed that more drives failed without S.M.A.R.T. notification than failed after one.
So at this time there's really no reliable way to check the health of your drive except 1) periodically run a disk utility to verify the health of the drive's directory and 2) keep at least 1 up to date backup for when the drive fails.
Just to concur with what has been said:
Hard drives can often be fine right up to the moment when they fail catastrophe. Don't waste your time continually checking your hard drive: just assume that it IS going to fail in the future, and be prepared for that.
The most important way to be prepared obviously is backing up your data:
http://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-1992
Mac users need no other utility, other than a backup utility. Everything else is for troubleshooting, not regular maintenance, and only should be done on a backed up system.
Health of HDD: How to check?