MISHA  "But it doesn't tell you anything's wrong with your drive until the moment it dies. It's crap."

That's not true -- I've had other utilities alert me of S.M.A.R.T. failures prior to a drive dying, which gave me time to copy the data off of it.

The attributes S.M.A.R.T. monitors are pretty thorough, see here.

No, it won't help if your drive suffers a sudden catastrophic failure, but it has its place.  
(Version 2.0.1)

ILGAZ  congrats on calling smart information and drive tests useless, you must be the first on planet.  
(Version 2.0.1)

KOSOVAR1  I've used SMART technology in all my desktop computers and my laptop for years and it has NEVER warned me of an impending failure. I've had five drives fail on me without warning (three firewire drives and two internal drives) and they were supposedly being "monitored" by SMART. I agree with the other commenters that SMART appears to be useless. I still use it (just in case it might work) in the form of the free SMARTReporter utility, but I'm sorry for the people who naively thought to pay $25 for this SMART Utility, apparently a lame one-trick pony. If you want to use this, at least use a free version of a SMART utility or buy it as part of a useful product. (For example, DiskWarrior and Drive Genius are GREAT products!)  
(Version 2.0.2)

MEEGO  I disagree SMART is useless. True I've had many disks fail without prior warning. But twice I had time to backup before disk fail thanks to a SMART alert. This was on PCs, with BIOS set to test SMART at startup.

It only takes one to realize just how much SMART is useful.

Last point, SMARTReporter is free and a very good job of periodically checking SMART status and informing the user whenever an error is reported.  
(Version 2.0.2)

APPLE4EVER  I understand a lot of people have not had good results with SMART. That's because most use utilities like Disk Utility, SMARTReporter, and DiskWarrior that only report on the overall SMART status. I find that status quite misleading too. That is why I developed SMART Utility. It looks at the individual attributes to find indications of failure. I have had a lot of success using that to determine drive failures that at first just look like a slow computer.

An example is my work MacBook Pro. I kept getting the spinning wheel and found I had a few bad sectors. So I backed up, zeroed out the drive, and restored. I was back running. But what happened a few months later? More spinning wheels, more bad sectors and eventually the drive was useless. But since I was running SMART Utility, I knew to back up my data before I lost anything.

So I find SMART is quite useful, and I am currently working on making the app even more useful, such as periodic scans to alert for new errors or problems. I would encourage everybody to try it out over a few months- especially if they are having problems. They may just save their data.   
(Version 2.0.2)

TOMQ  I used to have strange problems, repairing my main disk drive not infrequently,

often needing DiskWarrior to fix problems

I was only using Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and SMARTReporter.

Since using SMART Utility, I have been able to carefully monitor for Pending Bad Blocks and reallocated Bad Blocks discovering that these problems were occurring on my main hard drive. I replaced my harddrive under warranty and ALL PROBLEMS HAVE DISAPPEARED!

There are no more Pending Bad Blocks, much less reallocated Bad Blocks, and all the strange problems have gone away. I almost never need to repair with Disk Utility or Disk Warrior.

Monitoring my other computers to check for pending bad blocks and will replace any hard drive that has them. I'm a happy customer of SMART Utility. And, BTW, I have found the Support to be excellent.  
(Version 2.1)

APPLE4EVER  NEIL_M: I can address that. SMARTreporter- while very good at what it does- can miss problems when they are small. It relies on the overall PASS/FAIL of SMART, which is very conservative and usually is only trigged when the drive is so bad it can't be even used. SMART Utility will alert you to failures before they get bad, allowing you to back up sooner and recover more data.

SMARTctl does use the more extensive test- but it only displays everything in text format in a menu. SMART Utility displays all the data in a easy to read format, also highlights failing attributes in red, and provides an easy to read prefail warning in yellow or red. It also hasn't been updated for over a year (and is using an out of date version of smartctl).

I hope that answers your questions and shows you why SMART Utility is worth the money.   
(Version 1.2)

APPLE4EVER  I'm glad you gave the software another shot.

And yes, I agree, this would be awesome as a menu bar item. That's coming in a future version(which will be a free upgrade).   
(Version 1.0.3)

APPLE4EVER  Yes, SMARTReporter is free. But SMART Utility offers additional functionality, including pre-failure warnings, that SMARTReporter does not offer. Whereas SMARTReporter can report PASSED until a drive dies, SMART Utility will report FAILING long before the drive dies, and long before SMARTReporter reports FAILED.

Yes, there have been some bugs with SMART Utility- that is the case with any piece of software. But, if you look at the comments, you will see I am very quick to respond, and very quick to fix the bug. I always respond to complaints and comments within at least 24 hours, and usually within just a few hours.

Have you even tried SMART Utility? Try it and find out the difference.   
(Version 1.0.3)

APPLE4EVER  Yes, there is a bug with Intel machines. But don't rely on SMARTReporter- it does not have the deep drive inspection that SMART Utility has. SMARTReporter can report "PASSED" up until the drive dies, while SMART Utility will report "FAILING" before the drive dies, allowing backing up of important data.  
(Version 1.0.2)

APPLE4EVER  Please download version 1.0.3. It fixes a (stupid) bug in 1.0.2 exposed on Intel systems. (For those who understand, I released an object outside of an if statement where it was allocated. IE, not all the time would it be allocated, and not all the time would the OS care.)  
(Version 1.0.2)

APPLE4EVER  Thank you for purchasing SMART Utility. Version 1.0.1 should fix your hanging issues.   
(Version 1.0.1)

WIZARD2  V 1.01 still having problems on a G4 Powerbool with 2GB RAM and a slid good harddrive. 'Progress bar keeps animating but SMART status never updates.'

Still believe this can become a solid and useful product -- licensed user here.  
(Version 1.0.1)

APPLE4EVER  Can you type the following into terminal:

defaults write com.volitans-software.SMARTUtility OutputDebugMessages 1

This will turn on debugging messages. Then can you send me the file SMART Utility.log in ~/Library/Logs as well as console.log? That way I can see what is happening. Thanks!  
(Version 1.0.1)

REVCO  Hangs for me as well on a G4 PowerBook and MacMini PPC.  
(Version 1.0.1)

APPLE4EVER  Just an update, this freeze should be fixed in version 1.0.3. Thanks!  
(Version 1.0.3)

APPLE4EVER  Sorry, if you redownload the beta, it will last until the 15th. I should have given myself some leeway to get the new version out.   
(Version 1.0.0B1)

APPLE4EVER  ELIJAHG3:

"From the read me:

"If it says FAILING, it will probably die soon"

Based on bad blocks, this is NOT the case. There are billions of blocks on hard disks, and having a few go wrong is not an indication of it's impeding failure."

Based on my experience repairing over 3000 Macs as an Apple Certified Desktop and Portable Technician, having any bad blocks to indicate that the HD will fail. It may not be immediately, it may not be for months, but eventually it will fail. I've tried forcing the drive to reallocate the blocks, and sometimes it does. But then more will appear, and then more, and then eventually no data will be recoverable.

My customers are happy when the come in and are experiencing problems (spinning wheels/freezing), and I find its just a bad HD, and I caught it early enough to save most, if not all of their data.

All drive manufacturers will take back drives with bad sectors- even just a few. If the Mac is still under warranty, Apple will also replace the drive. You may take the chance, but I'd rather be safe than sorry when it comes to my data.

I hope that clears up why its reporting as FAILING.   
(Version 1.0.0B1)

ELIJAHG0  Thanks for the reply.

I have had reallocated blocks on many of my drives, some from years back. According to hard disk manufacturers, it only really becomes a problem if thousands of reallocations are occurring, not one or two.

I've dealt with a fair number of both Macs and PC's in my time, easily in the 4-500 range. obviously nothing like you, but quite a few.

I've only known two hard disks fail, one WD drive in my old Performa 6400, and a drive in a MacBook that was knocked off a table. A Seagate drive in my old G5 had troubles, it made that taletale whiiir click whiiir click sound as it's reallocating blocks. But, it still goes perfectly.

I was just pointing out that the drive isn't going to fail imminently just because of a few bad blocks. Only when it gets into the thousands it needs to be addressed.  
(Version 1.0.0B1)

APPLE4EVER  Yes, I understand that a few bad blocks doesn't necessarily mean that the drive will fail soon. But like I said, in my experience, it will fail eventually. My application just makes an assessment based on the SMART data, and makes a suggestion from that. You are of course free to take a chance. I leave what to do with the drive up to user. But I personally would get the drive replaced- just to be sure.

But thank you for raising this important point.  
(Version 1.0.0B1)

SMKOL  the problem is the all drives fail eventually. A key distinguishing issue is whether the bad blocks are new or old. If they already have data then presumably they are new bad blocks. I think that would be a way of increasing the warning level. Unfortunately it's not a way of general checking a large more or less empty drive.

We generally write zeroes across drives as soon as we can to give the drive a full coverage and a chance to reallocate blocks the first time to settle if blocks are new or old. Later if we run into a drive that has a delay writing zeroes again (we're in a situation where we re-image large numbers of computers annually or so) then we KNOW its a dying drive just because we've got history.

I don't know if you can build a kind of background write zeroes or ones into the system when idle without saving a file - or writing a file and mapping out sections of the drive until eventually the whole drive is covered - or even if its knowable that certain manufacturers do some write test at the factory and leave the blocks in a knowable state of 1 or 0.... something to give a baseline on changes in the drive....  
(Version 1.0)

APPLE4EVER  This is a known bug. If you would be willing to contact me at support@volitans-software.com, I would like to get a better idea of why it is happening. I have a theory, but I would like more information to be sure.

Thank you for your interest!  
(Version 1.0.0B1)