1.) If you are using a beta-version of SMARTReporter or just want to verify the failure-prediction, open '/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app' and select the said drive (not partition). You should see "S.M.A.R.T.-Status: Failing" at the bottom right - if not, you don't need to continue, but please tell me that SMARTReporter was wrong (*)!

2.) Immediately make a backup of all valuable data on the hard disk drive.

3.) Contact Apple, or your hard disk drive manufacturers technical support department for instructions. Some hard disk drive manufacturers consider a S.M.A.R.T. alert sufficient evidence that the hard disk drive is bad, and will immediately issue an RMA for its replacement.

In any case you shouldn't rely on said hard disk drive with critical data anymore.

These are just well-meant suggestions, you are of course free to ignore them.

"Please note that a S.M.A.R.T. alert doesn't mean that your HDD will completely fail for sure, nor can S.M.A.R.T. catch all possible HDD errors - it's just a very valuable indicator. Follow this link for more information about S.M.A.R.T. technology."

(*) S.M.A.R.T. errors sometimes appear just for a short period of time, and the status may have already changed back to "verified" when looking it up in Disk Utility. Keep in mind that the default polling interval in SMARTReporter is one hour, so it shows you the Red "failure icon" for the whole hour, even if the S.M.A.R.T. status was actually "bad" only for a few seconds during the last check.

To force SMARTReporter to re-read the S.M.A.R.T. information you just have to open its preferences-window. If you can open Disk Utility and SMARTReporter's preferences window at the same time and they both show a different result for a given hard disk drive there really is a problem and I would be VERY interested to fix this.

Q: Why does SMARTReporter report another S.M.A.R.T. status than Disk Utility?

Actually, it does not! All the reports of this behavior I've got to date have been based on this: sometimes S.M.A.R.T. errors only appear for a short period of time, and might have switched back until you verified it in Disk Utility. Please also refer to the above question, especially the (*) section.

Q: Why does SMARTReporter report another S.M.A.R.T. status than SMART Utility, TechTool Pro, ...?

SMARTReporter (like Apples Disk Utility.app) only looks at the S.M.A.R.T. summary status, which is an overall value calculated (by the drive) from the individual S.M.A.R.T. properties.

As far as I know, SMART Utility and TechTool Pro have mechanisms to calculate their very own summary status from the individual properties itself - ignoring the summary status S.M.A.R.T. provides - whether this really provides superior error-prediction is not known.

Q: Does SMARTReporter support external hard disk drives?

Only eSATA ones, please see the next question why USB / FireWire doesn't work.

I don't think any networked storage types (NDAS, AoE) support S.M.A.R.T.

Q: Why are my FireWire/USB/SCSI based hard disk drives not seen/supported?

"Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA, SATA or eSATA hard disk drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your SCSI or FireWire hard disk drive, send feedback to Apple."

All SCSI and some FireWire hard disk drives could work if Apple implemented S.M.A.R.T. checking for SCSI and FireWire in Mac OS X.

USB doesn't support the S.M.A.R.T. technology (the USB<->ATA bridge doesn't pass the S.M.A.R.T-data).

Q: Why would I need SMARTReporter although S.M.A.R.T. checking is built into Mac OS X?

Because Mac OS X only checks the S.M.A.R.T. status when you open "Disk Utility.app" and select the hard disk drive in question.

You probably don't want to do this every few minutes.

SMARTReporter automates these checks at an defined interval and informs you when it turns bad.

Q: Why are my hard disk drives attached to a PCI-ATA-card not seen/supported?

SMARTReporter depends on the built-in S.M.A.R.T. functions of Mac OS X, so I can only support what's supported by Mac OS X, and this depends on your ATA-card and it's driver.

ATA-Cards known NOT to work:

• ACARD Technology AEC-6280M

• ACARD Technology AEC-6880M

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P

• Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34

• SIIG Ultra-ATA 100/133 Pro

ATA-Cards known to work:

• Sonnet Tempo-133 ATA

• Sonnet Tempo-X SATA

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P

• Sonnet Tempo SATA X4P

• Sonnet Tempo SATA E4i

• Sonnet Tempo SATA X4i

• SIIG 4-port SATA (Model CN2529 SC-SA4M12)

If your hard disk drive is not seen by SMARTReporter you could do the following to ensure it's not a bug in SMARTReporter:

1.) Ensure the HDD in question is spun-up (by accessing files on it)

2.) Open Disk Utility.app and select said HDD (not the partition on it) and search at the bottom for something about "S.M.A.R.T. Status"

There you should either find "S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified" which means your HDD is supported (by Mac OS X), in the the other cases "S.M.A.R.T. Status: Not supported" or nothing there at all, it is not supported.

So if your HDD is (in Disk Utility.app)

a) SUPPORTED: It should also be supported by SMARTReporter, and if not please e-mail me so I can fix it

b) NOT SUPPORTED: this is most likely the failure of the driver of your ATA card in this case the blame is on your ATA card/driver manufacturer and I can do nothing to support it in SMARTReporter

Q: Can SMARTReporter tell me exactly which S.M.A.R.T. test is failing?

Yes, starting with version 2.4.5!

Right-click the drive in the drive-list in the preferences window and select "Check S.M.A.R.T. attributes".

Q: Is sending notification e-mails trough SSL/TLS supported?

Yes, but currently only when sending using Mail.app.

Q: Why doesn't Copy&Paste seem to work in SMARTReporter?

It works but only using the contextual menu of the text-field (right-click it).

The keyboard shortcuts do not work because SMARTReporter has no menu-bar.

Q: How can I uninstall SMARTReporter?

0.) Optional: Uncheck "Start SMARTReporter on login" in the Preferences of SMARTReporter

1.) Select "Quit" from SMARTReporter's menu

2.) Drag the "SMARTReporter" folder or application to the Trash

3.) Optional: Delete the following files:

~/Library/Logs/SMARTReporter.log

~/Library/Preferences/org.corecode.SMARTReporter

~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/org.corecode.SMARTReporterDriveData.MACADDRESS

~/Library/Preferences/SMARTReporter.plist (prior to 2.3.5)

~/Library/Preferences/SMARTReporterDriveData (prior to 2.3.5)

Q: I've set SMARTReporter not to display an icon in the Menu. How do I get it back?

To get the icon back, hold down alt/option while starting SMARTReporter.

Since this may be difficult to do when it is automatically started at log-in, you can also double-click SMARTReporter when it is already running to access the preferences window.

In case that doesn't work, terminate SMARTReporter using /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app and then move its preferences file (org.corecode.SMARTReporter.plist in the ~/Library/Preferences/ folder) to the trash, and start it again.

Q: Does SMARTReporter work when no user is logged-on?

No, this is on the ToDo-List but due to making a nearly complete rewrite necessary this feature is not due anytime soon.

You can use the smartmontools if you need this feature now, a UNIX command-line application.

Q: Why does SMARTReporter display only one menu icon although i have multiple HDDs?

The reason there is only one icon regardless of the number of installed hard disk drives is simple:

S.M.A.R.T. errors (or failing hard drives for that matter) are very rare and most users will never encounter such an situation, so it seems like a big waste (of menu space) to display multiple icons.

The icon turns red if at least one of your hard disk drives has a status of "failing".

In case there is an S.M.A.R.T. error there can be no confusion which HDD is affected, because the details are displayed in the warning dialogue and e-mail, also the preferences window and log file are just a click away.

Q: Why can't I command-drag the menu icon of SMARTReporter?

Apple reserved the command-drag functionality for their own menu-items, and doesn't expose this functionality through the public supported menu-item programming interface.

Some other people have reverse-engineered this private interface for their 3rd party menu-items, but this is kind of a "hack" and has serious drawbacks:

• Such menu-items run in system memory and could take down the whole user interface

• The programming interface may change with every System-update, leaving 3rd party menu-items that use this unsupported method broken

The only thing we can be done about this situation is to complain to Apple that command-drag doesn't work with menu-items that use the official programming interface.

Q: SMARTReporter contains memory leaks! What's up?

No it doesn't - at least not as of version 2.3.5 as far as i know. I appreciate reports of defects of all kind, including memory leaks - but please be aware that there are a lot of "false positives" in leak testing. In particular some "Input Managers" are known to inject memory leaks into ALL running applications. So before you send in a report about leaks be sure that you system is "clean" - i.e. (only) if you can reproduce the leak on a fresh install i'd be happy to hear about it.

Q: How do i run SMARTReporter in 64-bit mode?

SMARTReporter supports running in 64-bit mode on Intel, but by defaults starts in 32-bit mode. To change this use the "Get Info" panel in the Finder on SMARTReporter and uncheck "Open in 32-bit mode".