

Next, run diskutil list to find the drive identifier for the volume you want to test:Īs an aside, you can also find the drive identifier in System Information by looking for the BSD Name.Open your chosen Terminal and run the following command to install smartmontools with Homebrew:.This will display the SMART status through the Terminal. If you have Homebrew installed, you can install smartmontools to check the SSD health on your Mac. SMART’s numerical error code system provides more information about the drive’s specific calamity, but the broad headline delivered by macOS is enough for guessing how soon a drive will fail.Ĭheck Your SSD Health Using smartmontools #

“Failing” means the drive has an error that will soon become “Fatal”. “Verified” in this instance means the drive has no reported problems.


This helps macOS keep track of the SMART status of all your drives by default, and there are several tools that read this status with varying levels of detail. Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) is an automated self-test system for SSDs and more traditional HDDs. You can predict and plan for both failure types in advance based on certain characteristic failure patterns. As such, it pays to keep an eye on the health of a drive that might fail without warning. When it reaches the limit, it will suffer total failure and no data recovery is possible. but the flash memory used in SSDs can only survive a certain number of write cycles. They still have the same high rates of early failure. On the other hand, SSDs show a different failure curve. In contrast, there’s a relatively low rate of failure in the middle (i.e. In other words, there’s a high chance of failure at the beginning and end of a drive’s service life (i.e. If the drive spins up properly, it will likely last for years before suffering wear-based failure. Spinning HDD drives have a failure curve sometimes described as a “bathtub.” When you first get an HDD, there’s a high chance of failure thanks to so-called Dead On Arrival (DOA) units.
