Get SMART and hard drive failures: a follow-up

We received numerous reader replies to yesterday's report on SMART (or S.M.A.R.T more accurately) to detect impending hard drive failures. Here are the highlights:

Drive trouble warning message Bryan Woodbury writes: "Before the drive on our PowerBook died, we started to hear loud clicks and a grinding vibration sound. Then a yellow warning message showed up in the top right corner of the screen (Mac OS 9.1) similar to the message style seen when the Finder unexpectedly quits. It read: "There is a problem with the disk PowerBook. Some information may have been lost. Check any recently-used files for data loss, and use a disk-repair program on the disk."

Update: A reader confirms our suspicion that this is generated by the Mac OS (at least in OS 8 and 9; we do not know about X). It comes from the Finder's File Manager. See this Apple TechNote for confirmation. It has nothing to do with SMART.

CharisMac support for SMART Leonard Coco alerted us to the CharisMac Anubis SMART extension. He writes: "It constantly monitors SMART drives. It is a standalone extension, so it should work with other HD drivers not just CharisMac. It can be queried whenever you wish for info and gives a warning dialog if drive reports warning." Unfortunately, the page lists it as working only in Mac OS 8.

See also this CharisMac page for much more details on SMART.

Update: Jim Schroeder of CharisMac replies: "We do have a product called SMART which checks SMART enabled disks and alerts you if the drive is encountering fatal errors. However, it will only work with SCSI-based hard disks, checking only over SCSI busses and fibre channel busses for SMART enabled drives. We are making this product available for $20 through our webstore today if people are still interested. It works in OS 8 and OS 9."

HDT and SMART: HDT drivers must be installed? This FWB web page indicates that you must have HardDisk Toolkit drivers installed for you to be able to access SMART data via its software. However, Mark Siple reports that FWB Tools worked on his drive, even though it had Apple's drivers on it.

Protecting your data Finally, regarding hard drive failures in general (see also our item yesterday): Sean McNulty suggests looking at Arco's DupliDisk2 as a way to prevent data loss from a hard drive failure. It costs about $300 plus the cost of a second drive. He writes: "Their product allows for the real time mirroring of any matched pair of IDE drives (RAID 1) using a card that is driverless and invisible to the OS. I have used their stuff and it works pretty well under OS 9 scenarios. Their OS X utility is still under development."

A similar approach is the ABS from CMS, as we described in our Macworld Expo coverage from January.