It’s a good habit to routinely backup a Mac with Time Machine or another backup option anyway, but it’s extra important to immediately backup if you see any failing message pertaining to SMART Status or any other fatal error in the Disk Utility app. If you see any message stating the disk has a fatal hardware error or problem, the drive is also going to fail soon and needs to be backed up and replaced ASAPĪ SMART Status of “Failing” or any hardware error message is an urgent problem because the disk drive will soon cease to function entirely, leading to permanent data loss.Status says “Failing” the drive urgently needs to be backed up and replaced ** If the SMART Status says “Verified” the drive is in good health.Status” of the disk information overview in Disk Utility Select the disk from the list at the left of the Disk Utility screen (select the actual main disk, not a partition)*.Open “Disk Utility” on the Mac, Disk Utility is found in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder.This trick works the same on all modern versions of MacOS and Mac OS System software with the Disk Utility application. How to Check SMART Status of Disk Drives on Mac OS SMART, which stands for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology System, is a mechanism for reporting disk health or disk problems to the operating system, and SMART status can tell you if a drive is failing or has some other fatal error to the actual disk hardware, providing a very clear indicator that it’s time to urgently backup all important data and then replace the failing drive.Īs you can imagine, SMART status of a disk is quite important, and if you want to know whether a disk is about to fail then checking SMART status is perhaps one of the simplest and easiest ways to know.

Checking SMART status of a drive can give you actionable information about whether a disk is about to fail and therefore is in need of an urgent data backup and drive replacement. This article will walk you through how to check SMART status on hard disks in Mac OS, and it works with both SSD and HDD volumes.

Disk utility not showing hard drive