Do iMacs alert you if your HDD is failing?

[bobright]

I read some user who said his imac alerted him the hard drive was failing...is this true?

I am coming over from windows and am thinking wow macs even alert you if your hard drive is crapping out.

 

[S.B.G]

I read some user who said his imac alerted him the hard drive was failing...is this true?

I am coming over from windows and am thinking wow macs even alert you if your hard drive is crapping out.

By default, no they don't, but you can get a program called SMART Utility which is supposed to monitor the HDD status and warn you. However the S.M.A.R.T. technology isn't very robust and HDD's tend to fail more often than not where SMART will have never warned you.

If your computer starts acting up and you're getting weird errors and/or you hear some grinding or unusual noise, then you will have a good idea the HDD is failing.

I actually use a PC DOS-based program called Spinrite as a maintenance utility and data recovery utility on all my HDD's. You have to have an IBM-PC in order to use it though. You take the HDD out of the Mac and connect it to the IBM-PC and run the program. Below is my old MBP HDD in a Dell PC with Spinrite working on it.

 

[forty2j]

The spinning beach ball when you're trying to do something is probably the most reliable warning...

 

[AlligatorBloodz]

I read some user who said his imac alerted him the hard drive was failing...is this true?

I am coming over from windows and am thinking wow macs even alert you if your hard drive is crapping out.

Mine did. A warning popped up while I was using it. I have no extra software installed. It also listed it as failing on Disk Utility. I was able to use it for a few days and back up all my info. I was even able to wipe the drive my formatting it. Once I did that it bought the farm. Maybe it depends on how the HDD is failing, if that makes any sense.

 

[philipma1957]

Mine did. A warning popped up while I was using it. I have no extra software installed. It also listed it as failing on Disk Utility. I was able to use it for a few days and back up all my info. I was even able to wipe the drive my formatting it. Once I did that it bought the farm. Maybe it depends on how the HDD is failing, if that makes any sense.

this has happened to me with a few mac minis

 

[johto]

The spinning beach ball when you're trying to do something is probably the most reliable warning...

No it isnt. Hard disk can be slow even if its not going bad. beach ball can also be caused by clunky OS, bloated too old OS X gone bad / processes slowing your system down. If you have lot of beach balls, first thing is to do a clean system install and check again. EIther way you should always have a fresh backups done.