What to do about a failing hard drive
Reader Kjeld Sorenson had a nasty shock and doesn’t care to be surprised again. He writes:
I happened to have Disk Utility open the other day and much to my surprise I saw a warning about my Mac’s hard drive—that it had failed something called a SMART test and wasn’t reliable. First, should I replace the drive and secondly, how can I see alerts like this automatically?
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology and is a scheme built into hard drives, rather than computers. If a drive reports that it’s failed this diagnostic test it indicates that the drive is on its way to giving up the ghost, not that it will seize up in the next couple of minutes. This should allow you plenty of time to back up your data (which you should already have been doing) in preparation for that drive’s eventual demise. Of course, as in your situation, it’s possible that it failed the S.M.A.R.T. examination weeks ago and is that much closer to the grave.
In either case, given how inexpensive storage is, I wouldn’t ignore the problem. At the very least, get an external hard drive and clone the failing drive to it using a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. That way you not only have a complete backup of your failing drive, but you also have a drive you can boot and work from. You can later replace the failing internal drive if you care to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2043560/what-to-do-about-a-failing-hard-drive.html#tk.rss_all
