I have a Mac Pro (or Xserve) with an internal Apple RAID card. Why isn’t Drive Scope able to read the SMART information of the drives connected to the Apple RAID card?

I have a Mac Pro (or Xserve) with an internal Apple RAID card. Why isn’t Drive Scope able to read the SMART information of the drives connected to the Apple RAID card?

SMART data relies on the hardware passing that data directly. However, RAID controllers simulate their drives as logical (virtual) disks to the system, which means that hard drives connected to Apple RAID cards do not provide SMART data to macOS and are therefore unsupported by utilities that read SMART data, like Drive Scope.

If you want to know the SMART status of the individual drives that make up your hardware RAID, you can use Apple’s RAID Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities) or Apple’s System Information (also in /Applications/Utilities). In System Information, select the Hardware RAID option under the Hardware section to view the SMART status. Keep in mind that the SMART status displayed in these utilities is an overall health self-assessment, which doesn’t provide the predictive capabilities available in Drive Scope.

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