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Testing drives that don't support SMART

danhardt (apparently) - 02:43pm Oct 26, 2005 PST
via email

The discussion about SMART diagnosis has been valuable. However, I
have two external drives that don't support SMART (at least that's
what Disk Utility says). How do I test them to make sure they aren't
failing?

Dan

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tekelenb (apparently) - Oct 27, 2005 10:43 am (#1 Total: 1)

via email

Posts: 254

Re: Testing drives that don't support SMART

At 14:43 -0700 UTC, on 2005/10/26, Dan Hardt wrote:

> [...] I have two external drives that don't support SMART (at least that's
> what Disk Utility says).

I think it idepends on the interface whether a SMART status can be read. This
is based on my experience of not getting a FireWire drive's SMART status, and
then when I took it from the FireWIre enclosure to the internal IDE bus, its
SMART status could suddenly be retrieved. (I see that
<http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/> claims this is a shortcoming of Mac OS
X, not of SMART.)

So while it might indeed be that your drives aren't SMART drives, it might
also be that they are.

> How do I test them to make sure they aren't failing?

TechTool Pro (and perhaps other tools) can do some tests (read/write, and
search for bad blocks). It's not the same as what SMART appears to be about
though.

But basically, it's all about ensuring you have good backups.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

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