Monitoring hard drive health on MBP?

[karohan]

I have a 2010 MBP that I've owned for just a little bit less than a year and the hard drive failed on me. I got it replaced at the Apple Store, but I want to prevent it from happening again because one year is too soon for it to fail.

I want to monitor it, in case it wasn't just bad luck. Is using too much swap a reason for hard drive failure? I have 8gb of RAM but with virtual machines, sometimes I go into 5gb's of swap at points. It's odd because I only allocate a max of 1gb for the VM but it happens nonetheless. Also is using more RAM (or the brand of RAM, as I bought it third party) a reason for hard drive failure?

What tools can I use to monitor my hard drive health? What things should I monitor (e.g. load cycles, etc)? I think there is something called S.M.A.R.T. status that is supposed to do this, but it didn't prevent my previous HDD from failing on me before I could do anything about it.

 

[Intell]

Use SMARTMonitor. Its perhaps the best there is.

 

[karohan]

Do you have a link to it? A google search didn't lead me to a program called "SMARTMonitor", though some variations of that name did exist. I just don't want to get the wrong thing.

 

[GGJstudios]

Do you have a link to it? A google search didn't lead me to a program called "SMARTMonitor", though some variations of that name did exist. I just don't want to get the wrong thing.

First search result:

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[snaky69]

Do you have a link to it? A google search didn't lead me to a program called "SMARTMonitor", though some variations of that name did exist. I just don't want to get the wrong thing.

Even if you monitor it every second of it's service life, it will still eventually fail, all hard drives do.

Backup regularly is all you can do to make sure the hard drive going belly up isn't going to turn into a nightmare.

 

[karohan]

First search result:

View attachment 288682​

I usually agree with you when you prove people wrong or point out their laziness, but read my above post more closely . I did do a google search and I did not find a program called "SMARTMonitor" as was originally indicated. I did mention that I found variations of that name, which is the result you kindly posted. I then mentioned that I would prefer a link just to verify that that was the program he was referring to, and not a different (possibly obsolete program).

I wouldn't consider "S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools" identical to "SMARTMonitor". But I WOULD consider it a variation. So there's no need to be a smartass about it by insinuating that I didn't search by giving me a screenshot of the search results. A simple, more amicable verification would do.

Yes that first result is similar, but other posts in the list show equivalently similar names, so it's not like that was the only link that had a program with a name similar to "SMARTMonitor": http://i.imgur.com/Fijud.png

Thanks for the reply anyway, and I apologize in advance for seeming overly sensitive =D

 

[GGJstudios]

So there's no need to be a smartass about it by insinuating that I didn't search by giving me a screenshot of the search results.

I wasn't implying that you didn't search. I was reaffirming that the first search result was, indeed, the right one, and how I found it. There was no emotion, personal attack or inference in my post; only facts.

 

[karohan]

Even if you monitor it every second of it's service life, it will still eventually fail, all hard drives do.

Backup regularly is all you can do to make sure the hard drive going belly up isn't going to turn into a nightmare.

Yeah I backup every few days, and I realize that HDD's can fail rather sporadically, but I figure I can be a little more cautious than I was previously.

 

[Intell]

Opps. Error on my part. The program is called SMARTReporter.