What if there was a way to learn about problems with your hard drive before any serious problems arose? As it turns out, there is, and the astute reader will already know that we’re talking about SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) systems available on most hard drives. By reading and interpreting this health information, you can predict when problems might arise.

You can see basic SMART status information in an app like Disk Utility, but all you’ll see is whether the drive is verified or failing. With Techtool Pro or Drive Scope, you can see much more information, and get early warnings about when a drive might fail along with what attribute is contributing to that impending failure. With the SMART feature in Techtool Protection, monitoring occurs continuously, and issues a warning without checking a drive manually.

SMART has been around a while now, and has been updated in newer NVMe SSDs. In addition to the performance improvements that came with NVMe drives, health data was also standardized, resulting in consistent health reporting. As a result the results in Techtool Pro’s SMART check will look a little different for NVMe drives compared with SATA drives.

When Techtool Pro or Drive Scope give a SMART warning, you will want to keep a closer eye on them, but it doesn’t mean a drive needs to be replaced immediately. If a drive is failing SMART, replace it as soon as possible. Regardless, make sure your back up is always up to date. See our previous pro tip for backup tips.

Pro Tip: When a drive is failing SMART, it can stop functioning at any time.