1.) If you are using a beta-version of SMARTReporter or just want to verify the failure-prediction, open '/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app' and select the said drive (not partition). You should see "S.M.A.R.T.-Status: Failing" at the bottom right - if not, you don't need to continue, but please tell me that SMARTReporter was wrong (*)!

2.) Immediately make a backup of all valuable data on the hard disk drive.

3.) Contact Apple, or your hard disk drive manufacturers technical support department for instructions. Some hard disk drive manufacturers consider a S.M.A.R.T. alert sufficient evidence that the hard disk drive is bad, and will immediately issue an RMA for its replacement.

In any case you shouldn't rely on said hard disk drive with critical data anymore.

These are just well-meant suggestions, you are of course free to ignore them.

"Please note that a S.M.A.R.T. alert doesn't mean that your HDD will completely fail for sure, nor can S.M.A.R.T. catch all possible HDD errors - it's just a very valuable indicator. Follow this link for more information about S.M.A.R.T. technology."

(*) S.M.A.R.T. errors sometimes appear just for a short period of time, and the status may have already changed back to "verified" when looking it up in Disk Utility. Keep in mind that the default polling interval in SMARTReporter is one hour, so it shows you the Red "failure icon" for the whole hour, even if the S.M.A.R.T. status was actually "bad" only for a few seconds during the last check.

To force SMARTReporter to re-read the S.M.A.R.T. information you just have to open its preference window. If you can open Disk Utility and SMARTReporter's preferences window at the same time and they both show a different result for a given hard disk drive there really is a problem and I would be VERY interested to fix this.

Q: Why does SMARTReporter report another S.M.A.R.T. status than Disk Utility?

Actually, it does not! All the reports of this behavior I've got to date have been based on this: sometimes S.M.A.R.T. errors only appear for a short period of time, and might have switched back until you verified it in Disk Utility. Please also refer to the above question, especially the (*) section.

Q: Why does SMARTReporter report another S.M.A.R.T. status than SMART Utility, TechTool Pro, ...?

SMARTReporter (like Apples Disk Utility.app) only looks at the S.M.A.R.T. summary status, which is an overall value calculated (by the drive) from the individual S.M.A.R.T. properties.

As far as I know, SMART Utility and TechTool Pro have mechanisms to calculate their very own summary status from the individual properties itself - ignoring the summary status S.M.A.R.T. provides - whether this really provides superior error-prediction is not known.

Q: Does SMARTReporter support external hard disk drives?

Only eSATA ones, please see the next question why USB / FireWire doesn't work.

Q: Why are my FireWire/USB/SCSI based hard disk drives not seen/supported?

"Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA, SATA or eSATA hard disk drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your SCSI, FireWire or USB hard disk drive, send feedback to Apple."

All SCSI and some FireWire/USB hard disk drives could work if Apple implemented S.M.A.R.T. checking for SCSI and FireWire in Mac OS X (SCSI pass-through). Note that some drives could never work if their bridge controller doesn't pass support the necessary features.

For more information see this and this.

Q: Why would I need SMARTReporter although S.M.A.R.T. checking is built into Mac OS X?

Because Mac OS X only checks the S.M.A.R.T. status when you open "Disk Utility.app" and select the hard disk drive in question.

You probably don't want to do this every few minutes.

SMARTReporter automates these checks at an defined interval and informs you when it turns bad.

Q: Why are my hard disk drives attached to a PCI-ATA-card not seen/supported?

SMARTReporter depends on the built-in S.M.A.R.T. functions of Mac OS X, so I can only support what's supported by Mac OS X, and this depends on your ATA-card and it's driver.

ATA-Cards known NOT to work:

• ACARD Technology AEC-6280M

• ACARD Technology AEC-6880M

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P

• Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34

• SIIG Ultra-ATA 100/133 Pro

ATA-Cards known to work:

• Sonnet Tempo-133 ATA

• Sonnet Tempo-X SATA

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P

• Sonnet Tempo SATA X4P

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E4i

• Sonnet Tempo SATA X4i

• SIIG 4-port SATA (Model CN2529 SC-SA4M12)

If your hard disk drive is not seen by SMARTReporter you could do the following to ensure it's not a bug in SMARTReporter:

1.) Ensure the HDD in question is spun-up (by accessing files on it)

2.) Open Disk Utility.app and select said HDD (not the partition on it) and search at the bottom for something about "S.M.A.R.T. Status"

There you should either find "S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified" which means your HDD is supported (by Mac OS X), in the the other cases "S.M.A.R.T. Status: Not supported" or nothing there at all, it is not supported.

So if your HDD is (in Disk Utility.app)

a) SUPPORTED: It should also be supported by SMARTReporter, and if not please e-mail me so I can fix it

b) NOT SUPPORTED: this is most likely the failure of the driver of your ATA card in this case the blame is on your ATA card/driver manufacturer and I can do nothing to support it in SMARTReporter

Q: Can SMARTReporter tell me exactly which S.M.A.R.T. test is failing?

Yes, starting with version 2.4.5!

Right-click the drive in the drive-list in the preferences window and select "Check S.M.A.R.T. attributes".

Q: SMARTReporter keeps telling me it found I/O errors. Should I be worried?

I/O errors mean that a read or write operation to the hard disk has failed and they can come from a multitude of sources with different levels of severity - unfortunately there is no easy way to know why the I/O error occurred. The most common cause for I/O errors are "bad blocks" on your hard disk. When reading a file which has a "bad block", this will result in an I/O error (as often happens with scratched CDs/DVDs which SMARTReporter doesn't warn about). "Bad blocks" are quite common and are not a big problem, because these blocks are automatically remapped to "spare blocks". So if you get very sporadic I/O errors, this is probably caused by these normal bad blocks, and nothing to worry about. However if you get I/O errors more frequently this can either mean that:

• you are often reading from files with bad-blocks, but never writing to them, which would trigger the repair of the bad-block. You should overwrite the affected files with known-good copies.

• the hard disk has run out of "spare blocks" to re-map the "bad blocks", which is a serious problem

• the I/O errors are not caused by "bad blocks" but by something else. There are a lot of severe issues that can cause I/O errors including bad cabling, defective disk controllers, etc

My personal suggestion for dealing with disks that constantly emit I/O errors is the following procedure:

• erase and format the drive in Disk Utility with the option to overwrite the disk with zeroes

• test the drive e.g. by filling it with copies of a very large disk image and then mounting all those disk images

• if the drive emits I/O errors during this test you can throw it away (or replace under warranty). if the next drive in the very same slot has the same issues it may be a hardware issue (cabling, controller, etc). if the drive doesn't emit the errors during the test you can continue using it.

Please note, you can find professional information about the #1 source of I/O errors, "bad blocks", and advice how to deal with them here.

Q: Does SMARTReporter work with SSDs?

SMARTReporter "works" with SSDs in the sense that it recognizes them, and if they support S.M.A.R.T. it will check their summary-status and attributes and alert you if the status turns "failing". The question now is whether the SSD drive supports S.M.A.R.T. - which was designed to predict mechanical failures, which SSDs do not suffer from. However, SSDs also can also become broken, not because of mechanical failures but because of exhaustion of the limited number of write cycles. Some SSD drives report these write cycles as S.M.A.R.T. attribute (which can be inspecting by right clicking a drive in SMARTReporter) and report a failing S.M.A.R.T. summary status if the limit is approaching - in this case running SMARTReporter is just as useful as with a conventional drive - or even more so because only some mechanical failures can be predicted but the exhaustion of write cycles is determinable. To find out if your specific SSD drive does support S.M.A.R.T. - and to which extent - ask your vendor or possibly on the smartmontools support mailing list.

Q: Why do Copy&Paste or other keyboard shortcuts not seem to work in SMARTReporter?

Keyboard shortcuts should work beginning with version 2.5.7.

In previous versions keyboard shortcuts would not work, but things like copy and past can be used with the contextual menu (right click).

Q: How can I uninstall SMARTReporter?

0.) Optional: Uncheck "Start SMARTReporter on login" in the Preferences of SMARTReporter

1.) Select "Quit" from SMARTReporter's menu

2.) Drag the "SMARTReporter" folder or application to the Trash

3.) Optional: Delete the following files:

~/Library/Logs/SMARTReporter.log

~/Library/Preferences/org.corecode.SMARTReporter

~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/org.corecode.SMARTReporterDriveData.MACADDRESS

Q: I've set SMARTReporter not to display an icon in the Menu. How do I get it back?

To get the icon back, hold down alt/option while starting SMARTReporter.

Since this may be difficult to do when it is automatically started at log-in, you can also double-click SMARTReporter when it is already running to access the preferences window.

In case that doesn't work, terminate SMARTReporter using /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app and then move its preferences file (org.corecode.SMARTReporter.plist in the ~/Library/Preferences/ folder) to the trash, and start it again.

Q: Is there a workaround to enable I/O error checking for non-admin accounts?

Yes, but it is complicated and only works on Snow Leopard. Additionally you need the admin password to set this up. Also be aware that there may be negative security implications of this procedure.

1.) Open "/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app" öffnen

2.) Enter "sudo chmod 644 /private/var/log/kernel.log" without the quotes, press enter and enter the admin password

3.) Edit the invisible system config file "/private/etc/newsyslog.d/files.conf", replacing "640" with "644". E.g. TextWrangler can edit hidden system files.

4.) You need to repeat step 2 every time you run "Disk Utility's" "Repair permissions" feature, since this resets the permissions on the relevant file.

Q: Does SMARTReporter work when no user is logged-on?

No, this is on the ToDo-List but due to making a nearly complete rewrite necessary this feature is not due anytime soon.

You can use the smartmontools if you need this feature now, a UNIX command-line application.

Q: Why does SMARTReporter display only one menu icon although i have multiple HDDs?

The reason there is only one icon regardless of the number of installed hard disk drives is simple:

S.M.A.R.T. errors (or failing hard drives for that matter) are very rare and most users will never encounter such an situation, so it seems like a big waste (of menu space) to display multiple icons.

The icon turns red if at least one of your hard disk drives has a status of "failing".

In case there is an S.M.A.R.T. error there can be no confusion which HDD is affected, because the details are displayed in the warning dialogue and e-mail, also the preferences window and log file are just a click away.

Q: Why can't I command-drag the menu icon of SMARTReporter?

Apple reserved the command-drag functionality for their own menu-items, and doesn't expose this functionality through the public supported menu-item programming interface.

Some other people have reverse-engineered this private interface for their 3rd party menu-items, but this is kind of a "hack" and has serious drawbacks:

• Such menu-items run in system memory and could take down the whole user interface

• The programming interface may change with every System-update, leaving 3rd party menu-items that use this unsupported method broken

The only thing we can be done about this situation is to complain to Apple that command-drag doesn't work with menu-items that use the official programming interface.

Q: SMARTReporter contains memory leaks! What's up?

No it doesn't - at least not as of version 2.3.5 as far as i know. I appreciate reports of defects of all kind, including memory leaks - but please be aware that there are a lot of "false positives" in leak testing. In particular some "Input Managers" are known to inject memory leaks into ALL running applications. So before you send in a report about leaks be sure that you system is "clean" - i.e. (only) if you can reproduce the leak on a fresh install i'd be happy to hear about it.