Re: Micromat Drive Scope 1.2.7
Baltasar Tae
The Devices list in drive scope displays the health information for all of your drives at a glance. A green dot means your drive is currently reporting that it is healthy. A yellow triangle or red square will mean that the drive is reporting a warning or a failure, respectively. For more information, you can look under the attributes tab for information on what is causing a drive to report errors.
Drive Scope is an advanced SMART drive-testing and health-warning application. Building on the improvements to the SMART check in TechTool Pro, Drive Scope not only provides early warning when a drive is on the path to failure, but provides a deep dive into the health of the drive. See what errors have occurred, and when, along with whether the errors are temporary or an indicator of overall failure. You can even trigger the drive's internal testing to run manually, providing instant access to up-to-date drive health information
Hard drives (and solid-state drives) are the most failure-prone components in your Mac. For that very reason, drive manufacturers have built in self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology right into the drive. (a.k.a. SMART) Most utilities barely scratch the surface of this information, simply reporting the bare essentials: pass or fail. Too often, once the overall failure has occurred, there isn't enough time to get important data from the drive. With Drive Scope, you can see into the health of most any drive connected to your Mac.
The solid-state drives (SSDs) that Apple uses in its newest Macs* use a new connection type, called NVMe. Until now, no utility was available to read the SMART attributes from these drives, including Apple's Disk Utility. Beginning with the latest update, version 1.1.1, Drive Scope can read the data on these drives, providing access to your drive's health data.
Building on the improvements to the SMART check in Techtool Pro, Drive Scope not only provides early warning when a drive is on the path to failure but also provides a deep dive into the health of the drive. See what errors have occurred and whether the errors are temporary or an indicator of overall failure. You can even trigger the drive's internal testing to run manually, providing instant access to up-to-date drive health information. With Drive Scope, you are in control of your drive's health.
This article looks at how you can check the S.M.A.R.T. indicators on SSD and hard drives in, and connected to, your Mac so that you can keep an eye on their degradation, and try to prevent problems before they become serious.
S.M.A.R.T. indicators are not perfect predictors of SSD life, nor of drive failure. Studies performed in data centres with very large numbers of rotating drives have shown that some indicators are reliable, and when they start going wrong you should be worried, while others are seldom of much use.
This 5.99 utility from the App Store improves on macOS by stating when S.M.A.R.T. status was last checked, and is designed to sit in the background, making periodic checks and alerting you to any problems as they develop. It also checks for infamous I/O errors, which are another indicator of incipient drive problems.
This rich array of hardware testing tools includes S.M.A.R.T. status checks, which can be viewed from a single test, or monitored in the background. Rather than reveal the individual results, it displays a set of twelve (for SSDs, more for hard drives) indicators, on an analogue scale from Pass to Fail.
I have been a fan of DriveDx for a long while now. It remains the only comprehensive drive tool, providing full information and S.M.A.R.T. indicators for all drives which are supported by macOS. As with Drive Scope, it can also cover USB drives if you install a free extension.
For an SSD, DriveDx gives all twelve S.M.A.R.T. indicators, with raw values, descriptions of what they mean, changes, and more. Its interpretation of drive temperature is still a little puzzling, but for indicators 173 and 174, it is detailed and very helpful. If you want to monitor the ageing of your SSD, this is exactly what you need.
To be blunt, I find that all the fancy adornments to the interfaces are wonderful for a novice user. For a serious technician with more than a handful of drives, the visual clutter makes sorting through data more difficult. The simple tabular representation is better for visual sorting as it groups first drives with status and then individual drive details.
Lifespan is intended to address the ever increasing use and reliance on flash-based storage. If you require the most out of your solid state drives or other flash-based storage devices, you can benefit from knowing how much useful life is remaining on those drives. Flash-based storage devices have a finite life, and when they exceed this lifespan, their performance can begin to degrade, or they can stop working entirely. It can be extremely valuable to be aware of the available life remaining, particularly in scenarios where these devices are used vigorously.
Lifespan is a macOS Menu Bar application which is designed to monitor the remaining useful life for flash-based storage devices. It will display the remaining useful life for your solid state drive (SSD), and we hope to support CompactFlash and CFast devices soon. The Lifespan menu will display current life usage and will alert you when the device is below the threshold of useful life remaining. Armed with this knowledge, these flash-based storage devices can be retired before the risk of losing data becomes likely.
The solid state drives (SSDs) that Apple uses in it's newest Macs* use a new connection type, called NVMe. Until now, no utility was available that could read the SMART attributes from these drives - including Apple's Disk Utility. Beginning with the latest update, version 1.1.1, Drive Scope can read the data on these drives, providing access to your drive's health data
Building on the improvements to the SMART check in Techtool Pro, Drive Scope not only provides early warning when a drive is on the path to failure, but provides a deep dive into the health of the drive. See what errors have occurred, and when, along with whether the errors are temporary or an indicator of overall failure. You can even trigger the drive's internal testing to run manually, providing instant access to up-to-date drive health information. With Drive Scope, you are in control of your drive's health.
What's New:
- Advance drive health warnings. Complete drive information.
- The most complete SMART utility for the Mac.
- High Sierra Compatible
- And now supporting the solid state drives in the latest Macs!
Drive Health
With Drive Scope you can see the complete picture of your Drive's health. Granular information about each aspect your drive is monitoring is available for review. See each of the attributes that contribute to the drive's health - in detail. See which attributes contribute to overall failure versus those that are merely informational.
Modern Solid State Drives
The latest Macs' solid state drives replace the aging SATA connection with a new connection type, known as NVMe. This connection, until now, didn't allow sharing of the drive's SMART data. These modern SSDs display their health data a little differently, so you'll see a different selection of tabs for these drives.
Control over Testing
Typically, a drive will check it's SMART attributes whenever it is convenient. With Drive Scope, you can manually trigger the drive's internal tests to make sure the SMART data is as up-to-date as possible. Check how long since the last time the drive ran a test with the drive's testing log.
Information
When you first open Drive Scope, an information page is displayed, summarizing all the critical information about your drive. See Drive Scope's advanced health assesment at a glance, along with the number of errors encountered, as well as model and capacity information specific to your drive.
The Chronoscope X1 is a fantastically finished device made of first-class materials. A high-quality capacitive touchscreen shows the measurement results on its brilliant, high-contrast display. The bright, full-colour display has a high-grade aluminium framing and an adjustable base.The Chronoscope X1 can be fully integrated into the central WiCoTRACE test parameter and result management system and has the advantage of a traceable, productive measurement process.
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