How to monitor a Mac OS hard drive?

This article will shed some light upon free ways available to monitor several activities on the Macintosh HD and its several volumes. We shall also be taking the help of non-Apple utilities to take care of some of the drive issues.  

• S.M.A.R.T - This comes in-built with every Mac model and is child's play to view the overall status of the health of the hard drive. To view S.M.A.R.T, go through Application<Utilities<Disk Utilities, select the main hard drive (Seagate 100.00 GB HD). Else, you can also select the hard drive displayed with icons to generate SMART status. One you choose a hard drive, click on the “Info” button, or hit the keyboard command which is “CMD+I”. Another window appears displaying the related S.M.A.R.T information. A positive SMART status brings relief to a Mac user; otherwise a failing status is a sign of concern i.e. hard drive failure.  

• Temperature: - I bet, this activity might be on the least priority in normal room conditions. Ever wondered about those Mac users sitting with their Macs in places like Paraguay or some other place which are quite hot and humid. This is where the need for monitoring the hard drive temperature is most needed. Since, disk utility doesn't give you facility to manually monitor the hard drive temperature; there is no. of paid apps that can do it for you.  Temperature Gauge: - Available at $10, proved to be of great help when you need to analyze the rise & fall of your Mac hard drives.

• Verify Disk: - This is the field of disk utility and it perfects in it by running a full scan of the Macintosh HD, finding logical faults and bringing up to the user. If the Mac volumes are suffering from damaged directory structure, Invalid Tree Nodes, and bad blocks then anyhow the disk utility will let the user know. Though disk utility is built to repair any kind of logical corruption some major errors & directory corruption may be beyond the repair of Disk Utility. Moreover, if the hard drive has got few or more bad blocks then disk utility won't let you find them. To overcome this limitation of the disk utility, take the help of a 3rd party tool like 'Stellar Drive Monitor' which is equipped to scan the entire hard drive and locate all the bad sectors one-by-one. As soon as you realize the Mac disk is infected with bad blocks, immediately take necessary action by using a hard drive clone utility to image the drive and save it to a safer location. The imaging utility will ascertain that it copies all the data from the good sectors, leaving behind the bad ones. This way you can save all that data residing on the Mac OS X hard drive that contain bad blocks. 

Conclusion: - It is always good to ensure Mac hard drive safety with the help of Macs own disk utility as well as a non – Apple tool. Though such tools are not available for free but spending few bucks on buying these tools rather than spending on a hard drive repair is left to the users to decide.