Check Mac Hard Drive Temperature, Health, and SMART Status

What makes your Mac machine special for you? Is it this excellent operating system (OS) itself or the data you stored on it? Well, both the OS and the data can be special, as they are collectively stored together on a mutual platform i.e. the Mac hard drive. 

Hard drive is a less logical, but delicate mechanical structure. It facilitates storage for all your digital data, such as images, videos, audio, files and documents, and most importantly, the operating system. The hard drives being manufactured today include a technology, referred to as S.M.A.R.T i.e. Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. It is a self-checking mechanism that reports health and present working status of the hard drive; besides, it warns the user about the critical condition of the hard drive before it dies.

Check S.M.A.R.T Status of Your Hard Drive

Disk Utility is an efficient disk management tool in Mac OS X that reports the S.M.A.R.T status of the complete hard drive (Volumes do not have S.M.A.R.T status). Let us see where and how Disk Utility shows this status:

• Open Disk Utility (Applications-> Utilities folder).
• Click your hard drive shown in the left-pane.
• Now, go to First Aid tab in the right-pane (It is the default tab).
• Refer to the information shown in the bottom-pane and look for S.M.A.R.T status.
• If it displays “Verified”, that means your hard drive is OK.
• Back up your data immediately to avoid data loss otherwise, as it may conk out.

Check Boot Volume Health

In case you find the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive other than “Verified”, you can check health of the boot volume; besides, create a backup of your data. Let us know how to check a volume health:

• Open Disk Utility (Applications-> Utilities folder).
• Click the boot volume in the left-pane and First Aid tab in the right-pane, respectively.
• Click “Verify Disk” beneath the window showing drive status detail and let it finish.

If you get any red colored error messages, it indicates the volume is suffering from criticality. Therefore, you need to repair it as:

• Restart your Mac while pressing and holding “Option” and “R” keys.
• Select “Recovery HD” in the boot menu.
• Go to Disk Utility in the Mac OS X utility screen.
• Click the boot volume in the left-pane and First Aid tab in the right-pane, respectively.
• Now, click Repair Disk and let it run.
• Boot your Mac normally, once disk repair finishes.

Hard Drive Temperature

The temperature of your Mac hard drive as well as of CPU relies on several factors, i.e. if it is shut down, it remains on a normal room temperature or nearby; if it is running, the temperature relies on the process going on inside the machine. Generally, hard drive temperature rises during rigorous use of resources and an overheated drive affects machine’s performance (and may suffer from disk failure).

Mac OS X does not offer any hard drive temperature reporting mechanism in the Disk Utility to avoid failure due to overheating. However, you can use external software to check Mac hard drive temperature and health.