How good is SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) for really finding and predicting drive problems for regular hard drives and now, for SSDs.
Different testing tools for Mac’s on the market report different levels of SMART levels. For example, Disk Utility, Scannerz, and SMARTReporter all seem to report what I would call a catastrophic failure level or an “OK” level. You have no idea what the details are.Others like smartmontools, TechTool Pro, and I think Drive Genius (not sure on that) can report a lot more detail with a lot of different parameters.
I had a drive in my system and I was preparing to do a clean install of Mountain Lion on it. I have TechTools Pro and thought I’d check out the SMART status on the drive before installing just to make sure it was OK. All the SMART parameters came back looking good. Note, I’m not blaming TechTools Pro for this, but I think the problem is with problem detection in SMART, as you’ll soon see.
I went ahead and started doing the install, and about 20 minutes into it the thing starts tapping. If you’ve ever seen a drummer do one of those rhythms where they’re tapping on the drum rim instead the actual drum head, that’s about what it sounded like. After maybe about 30 seconds of this the thing starts screeching like crazy. The install terminated. I put an old Snow Leopard install disc into the system and booted off the DVD, and now Disk Utility is saying the drive is unusable and that SMART status has failed.
If I checked this drive with extensive SMART capabilities just about 45 minutes before and it reported no problems, what good is SMART testing? Since I’m considering replacing the drive with an SSD, is SMART any better on that?