How to Check Disk Health on Mac with smartctl

There are numerous methods to examine the well being of a tough disk drive (HDD) and strong state drive (SSD) that’s used on a Mac with drives that help SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. These choices vary from pretty easy using Disk Utility to examine the SMART standing of a drive, to rather more complicated with third celebration instruments like DriveDX.

We’re going to introduce one other glorious choice for Mac customers to watch and analyze the well being of their storage units, using a command line device referred to as “smartctl”.

The smartctl utility will examine SMART standing self-assessments of drive well being, present the temperature of inner drives, in addition to supply learn and write info (which is related notably for SSDs), and common drive well being evaluation.

How to Use smartctl to Check Mac Drive Health

To get began with smartctl, you want to set up it with HomeBrew first. Yes meaning you’ll need to set up Homebrew in the event you haven’t carried out so already (listed here are directions for macOS Sonoma, Ventura, and later).

Open the Terminal utility if in case you have not carried out so already to start.

First, set up smartctl:
brew set up smartmontools

After Homebrew completes the set up of the smartctl package deal, you might be prepared to make use of the utility to show details about your disk device and drive well being:

smartctl -a disk0

(Replace disk0 with disk1, disk2, and so on if in case you have a number of drives and need to examine these as an alternative)

You’ll get a report back within the command line that will learn one thing like the next:

% sudo smartctl -a disk0
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [Darwin 23.4.0 arm64] (native construct)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Model Number: APPLE SSD AP1024Z

Serial Number: 0ea8r31b280003

Firmware Version: 373.100.

PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: 0x106b

IEEE OUI Identifier: 0x000000

Controller ID: 0

NVMe Version: 1.2

Number of Namespaces: 3

Local Time is: Wed Apr 10 01:11:24 2024 PDT

Firmware Updates (0x02): 1 Slot

Optional Admin Commands (0x0004): Frmw_DL

Optional NVM Commands (0x0004): DS_Mngmt

Maximum Data Transfer Size: 256 Pages

Supported Power States
St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat
0 + 0.00W – – 0 0 0 0 0 0

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment check end result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)

Critical Warning: 0x00

Temperature: 41 Celsius

Available Spare: 100%

Available Spare Threshold: 99%

Percentage Used: 2%

Data Units Read: 471,985,722 [241 TB]

Data Units Written: 102,955,161 [52.7 TB]

Host Read Commands: 13,949,509,366

Host Write Commands: 1,322,749,058

Controller Busy Time: 0

Power Cycles: 255

Power On Hours: 1,514

Unsafe Shutdowns: 5

Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0

Error Information Log Entries: 0

Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogWeb page failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745

As you’ll be able to see, a number of useful and revealing info is offered by smartctl, together with temperature, disk learn/write data, unsafe shutdowns (crashes or energy conditions), energy cycles, hours of the drive on, and rather more.

One part you’ll notably need to take note of when checking drive well being is the “SMART overall-health self-assessment test result” part, which you’ll want to say PASSED. If that claims FAILED, you’ll want to backup your knowledge instantly, as a result of the disk could quickly fail, which may end in catastrophic knowledge loss.

Whatever the case, whether or not the drive is wholesome or not, and passes SMART checks or not, make it a behavior to setup Time Machine and routinely backup your Mac. Backing up your pc is likely one of the most necessary issues you are able to do, as a result of with out backups, if there’s a catastrophic drive failure, harm to the pc, loss, or theft, your knowledge is gone too. Don’t be in that scenario, consider backups like an insurance coverage policy – properly well worth the premium!

Do you employ smartctl or some other SMART monitoring instruments to examine the well being of your disk drive? What do you consider these options? Let us know within the feedback.