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I love my MBP, but I constantly hear the disk spinning up and down. I can't find something similar to smartctl in linux to monitor my load cycles. I don't want to burn my disk out in a year. Can someone recommend an alternative?

Chealion
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hvgotcodes
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3 Answers3

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If you have Homebrew, Macports, or Fink they have a package called smartmontools which includes smartctl. Install one of those package managers and install that package.

nelsonjchen
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If you're looking for programs to monitor the SMART status on your hard drive:

  • Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. Click on the hardware (not the partition) and at the bottom you'll see S.M.A.R.T. Status as either Verified (Good) or Failed.
  • SMARTReporter - lives in your menu bar and will give you the SMART status of any drive connected.

If you want a Mac version of smartctl there is an older GUI app that includes 5.38 called smartctl as well. The other alternative is to either compile it from source or use one of the several packaging projects available for Mac OS X.

Additionally if you're worried about the amount your hard drive is spinning down and having to spin back up you can turn off "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver Preference Pane in System Preferences.

Community
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Chealion
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If you want to see what may be writing to disk:

fseventr -- GUI for FSEvents

sudo rwsnoop -v -- at the commandline; uses DTrace to monitor which processes read/write to disk, also try sudo iosnoop and sudo fs_usage -e -f filesys as other ways to probe what is going on. You may need to pipe output to a textfile for better analysis...

The Tentacle
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