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.   
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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.  
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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.  
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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....  
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MACUPDATE ADMIN  It occurs to me that perhaps if you were using this you might've discovered this behavior sooner.  
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ELIJAHG3  Actually, I do usually use MenuMeters, it's great! It's just that I recently reinstalled OS X on my RAID, so I didn't have it installed.

Menumeters is the greatest menu extra ever!

Just a little tweak to Fans, and i'm sure that it could be great :)  
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BUSCHFEUER  I know about the CPU time problem. But that doesn't occure on all Macs. For example: There is no problem on my MBPro. But currently I am working on a completly new version of Fans to solve this problem.

Nelson  
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ELIJAHG3  That's great to know :)

Thanks!  
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