Enabling S.M.A.R.T monitoring on External Drives

[crisgo]

current setup is M1 Mac Mini. internal SSD 256, TimeMachine: external 1tb SSD (Samsung T7) Three external drive STAT interface. one of the exteranl has been giving me problems. While fixing these problems I have dicovered that MAC by defaule does not allow doe S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. My question has anyone tried this:

How Can I Monitor S.M.A.R.T. Status (Disk Health) With Disk Drill?

S.M.A.R.T. is a monitoring system built in computer hard disk drives (HDD), solid-state drives (SSDs), and eMMC drives. S.M.A.R.T. is an abbreviation for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, and sometimes you can see it written simply as SMART. This system’s […]

www.cleverfiles.com

My permanent fix when M1 is replaced, is to upgrade external drives with ThunderBolt SSD

thanks

 

[Bigwaff]

While fixing these problems I have dicovered that MAC by defaule does not allow doe S.M.A.R.T. monitoring.

Yes and no. True macOS does not support SMART monitoring of external USB drives. However, macOS does support SMART monitoring of external Thunderbolt drives.

For USB drive support, you will need to install an open source kernel extension. DriveDx provides a signed version of this kernel extension.

DriveDx - external USB and FireWire drive diagnostics support

binaryfruit.com

It's open source and hasn't been updated in nearly a decade. Supposedly still works in recent versions of macOS. However, your mileage may vary depending on the USB enclosures and/or drives.

 

[gilby101]

external 1tb SSD (Samsung T7) Three external drive STAT interface. one of the exteranl has been giving me problems.

Read this as an addition, based on my experience with USB 3.x drives, to the post above from @Bigwaff.

Even with DriveDX (and the kernel extension) installed, you will find that this only works reliably with SATA drives (usually HDD). Most SSDs are not SATA. DriveDX used to report SMART for my SamsungT5 - but it no longer does so. It doesn't even "see" my Samsung T7 - so no SMART for that.

DriveDX comes with the SATMARTDrive from (or is it based on?) https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver. I don't know if this more recent fork https://github.com/Artoria2e5/SatSmartDriver_kext works better - I think this is used in Micromat's Lifespan 2 https://www.micromat.com/products/lifespan/

Unless you are prepared to go round in circles a few times, I would not struggle DriveDX for external USB 3.x SSDs. Maybe worth the effort for USB HDD, works fine on Intel - I assume it does for Apple silicon.

For internal SSD and external Thunderbolt 3 SSDs, DriveDX works out of the box.

I have not used Disk Drill to monitor SMART. But works the same way as DriveDX and uses yet another fork of the kernel extension which looks (from the version number) very like that from DriveDX/kasbert.

iMac 2019, macOS 15.2, DriveDX 1.12.1 for internal SSD, external HDD and Thunderbolt SSD (fails with Samsung T5/T7)
MBP 2023, macOS 15.2, DriveDX 1.12.1 for internal SSD.