Great Reason to Run SMART Utility: Gruber HD Failure

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 | Opinion, SMART Utility | Comments Off

John Gruber, of DaringFireball fame, just had his HD fail. He noticed it because everything was running very slow. He ran DiskWarrior which recovered his data but alerted him to a problem. SMART Utilility would most likely have alerted him to this issue a lot sooner. He was lucky because he also had a SuperDuper backup as well as a DropBox backup.

He makes a lot of good recommenations, and I encourage you to read the full story, but this is my favorite part:

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

A hard drive failure can happen to anybody. Be prepared when it does, and be alerted before it does. That’s why I made SMART Utility.

SMART Utility 2.2 is Out

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

I’m please to release version 2.2 of SMART Utility. The biggest features are opening and saving SMART data reports, printing, and better support for SSDs. Get it here.

Full release notes:

- Added support for saving and opening drive reports in native format

- Added support for printing SMART reports

- Fixed bug where scanning capabilities that would cause an error

- Fixed bug where in rare cases scanning SMART data would cause a crash

- Improved debug log formatting

- Moved log files to a subfolder

- Now log window updates live

- Updated smartctl engine to 5.39 providing more fixes and recognizes more drives, including SSDs

- Updated eSellerate embedded engine to 4.0.0.7

SMART Utility 2.1.2 is Out

Monday, December 14th, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

Few bug fixes. Get it here.

- Fixed a crash on 10.4 Intel systems with Growl 1.1.6 installed (related to Growl Framework 1.2)
- Fixed bug where certain drives would only show “calculating…” for short tests
- Improved Estimated Time Remaining for short tests

SMART Utility 2.1.1 is Out

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

This one’s mostly bug fixes. Get it here.

Full Release Notes:

- Fixed bug where on new installs scans every 50 seconds instead of every hour
- Fixed bug where polling preference time shows unknown time
- Fixed bug where error window would not open on some drives
- Fixed bug where reading health would cause an exception
- Fixed bug where outputting debug message would cause crash in self test log
- Fixed bug where with French localization where main window and tests window would not localize self test error statuses
- Fixed default opening tab for preferences
- Fixed a small memory leak
- Improved debug log information output
- Now Main window saves its position
- Updated help with changes to polling as well as two new FAQs
- Updated eSellerate embedded engine to 4.0.0.6
- Updated Growl framework to 1.2 (which is 10.5 only but should still work for 10.4 Growl installs)

SMART Utility is a Mac Gem

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

Check out the nice review of SMART Utility on macworld.com.

The author does a fair job of reviewing the app, showing the positives and negatives of the app as well as SMART in general.

One note however. At the end he states:

Unfortunately, whereas SMARTReporter can run in the background, with or without a menu-bar icon, SMART Utility is a standard Mac program, which means it appears in the Dock whenever it’s running; I’d have preferred an approach similar to that of SMARTReporter. I’d also like to see additional alert options, similar to those provided by SMARTReporter; for example, e-mail alerts and the capability to launch an application or run an AppleScript. But SMART Utility’s additional drive details could make it more useful than SMARTReporter for many people.

Version 3.0 of SMART Utility (in development now) will have the ability to run in the background as a menu bar icon, and will support additional notifications, such as email and launching an application.

SMART Utility 2.1 is out!

Monday, September 7th, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

The biggest new feature is that while the application is open, it can scan drives in the background. So users can leave it running and it will alert if a drive is failing. This is really useful with Growl installed.

Get it here:

Full release notes:

- Added preference to update drives in the background
- Added preference to only flag failing test if it is new
- Added better error handling for problems reading SMART data
- Added estimated time remaining for a test
- Fixed a bug with display of reallocated bad sectors on main window
- Now updates progress bar of SMART data update sheet

SMART Utility: 10.6 Compatibility

Monday, August 24th, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

Since Apple is shipping 10.6 this Friday, I thought I should comment on SMART Utility and 10.6. Unfortunately, I just obtained access to ADC this week, and I have not downloaded the GM seed yet. So I do not know if SMART Utility is compatibility with 10.6. However, I do not believe there will be an issue, as SMART Utility does not use many of the API’s that could potentially cause an issue. There was no changes needed when upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5, so I am guessing the same will occur with this upgrade.

But, as soon as I get my hands on it and test it, I’ll update the blog with the results.

Update: I have installed Snow Leopard, and SMART Utility 2.0.2 is fully compatible with 10.6. I will have a new blog post with a Snow Leopard review in a week or so.

SMART Utility 2.0.2 is out!

Monday, June 8th, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

Its mostly just bug fixes and small additions. Get it here.

Here are the release notes:

- Added French localization for help
- Now main window refreshes when a test is complete
- Now shows serial number when attempting to register again
- Now updates registration menu depending on whether application is registered or not
- Fixed bug where unregistering would cause application to consider the demo period expired
- Fixed some memory leaks
- Fixed some incorrect texts in help
- Optimized debug log for faster output
- Optimized launching code
- Serial number is now in a separate file to allow deleting of preferences without losing registration information

SMART Utility 2.0 is out!

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | SMART Utility | Comments Off

Finally, after many months of work, SMART Utility 2.0 is out! There are many new changes, but the biggest is the addition of testing support. Now SMART Utility can run the drives built-in self tests to check from malfunctions. Get it here.

Full release notes are on the right sidebar.