I'm wondering if anyone can advise this noob on best basic management / monitoring of external SSDs (not as boot). On the reasonable belief that rumours of the death of DriveDx have been greatly exaggerated, I'm persisting with that as my default disk health monitoring tool. But the history has been perplexing to say the least. I think the perplexity really started with the move to my M1 iMac. But it may have been earlier - e.g. the move to external SSD from HDD, I'm not sure now.
Anyway, I've just found that with or without the sat-smart driver installed, I get a dog's breakfast of S.M.A.R.T. status readings and health indicators between DriveDx, Drive Scope and SMART Utility. They variously rate my two ext SSDs as passed, failing and failed, and with a wide variety of assessments of the finer details of drive health. With DS & SU, but not Ddx, the SMART status is always "passed", despite a sea of red text warnings of "failing" or "failed" on various measures. With Ddx it's just failure everywhere, X, tones of red and yellow markings, almost no green, and it's like that from the very start with those drives (yes, even when brand new).
Now in one sense I don't my really mind about having all the "right " readings on disk health. It's not something I want to follow meticulously. But I do want to know when I actually should be worried about drive failure, versus when it's a false alarm. Can I realistically expect to have that? Or is that too much to ask of macos with external SSDs and the sat-smart driver?
The two relevant drives I have are:
It might be worth adding that I've tried out Samsung's "Magician" app. It gave my T7 Shield a clean bill of health on every measure. I suspect that would be more definitive than the alarming readings I get from the other apps? Sadly there's no such OEM mac app for my SanDisk Extreme.
As far as the actual history goes - the Extreme has performed solidly without skipping a beat since I got it at the start of last year. The T7 has been more umm interesting. I've had it less than a year, and in that time the data (TM backups) has become corrupted 3 times without warning. It hasn't been a practical option to recover data (just takes too long), and I have another backup (iDrive, cloud). So I've just reformatted and started over each time. What the cause of that might be is another matter (I think). But I assume it doesn't relate to SMART or drive health, since the Samsung Magician app says it's hunky dorey. Either way, no help from DriveDx or any of the others with any of that.
I think that about covers it. Is there something I'm missing that might make S.M.A.R.T. etc work better for me with these ext SSDs? What have others found? (I should clarify - As the noob I am, I'm not likely to fare well with any really geeky CLI or coding solutions, though I don't mind trying. GUI apps preferred). Thanks.
Anyway, I've just found that with or without the sat-smart driver installed, I get a dog's breakfast of S.M.A.R.T. status readings and health indicators between DriveDx, Drive Scope and SMART Utility. They variously rate my two ext SSDs as passed, failing and failed, and with a wide variety of assessments of the finer details of drive health. With DS & SU, but not Ddx, the SMART status is always "passed", despite a sea of red text warnings of "failing" or "failed" on various measures. With Ddx it's just failure everywhere, X, tones of red and yellow markings, almost no green, and it's like that from the very start with those drives (yes, even when brand new).
Now in one sense I don't my really mind about having all the "right " readings on disk health. It's not something I want to follow meticulously. But I do want to know when I actually should be worried about drive failure, versus when it's a false alarm. Can I realistically expect to have that? Or is that too much to ask of macos with external SSDs and the sat-smart driver?
The two relevant drives I have are:
- SanDisk Extreme 1TB. Two volumes - One used to store my music, photos, videos, and some email archives, as alternative to home folder on boot; the other for a clone backup of internal boot drive using SuperDuper!
- Samsung T7 Shield 2TB. Single volume. Used exclusively for TM backup.
It might be worth adding that I've tried out Samsung's "Magician" app. It gave my T7 Shield a clean bill of health on every measure. I suspect that would be more definitive than the alarming readings I get from the other apps? Sadly there's no such OEM mac app for my SanDisk Extreme.
As far as the actual history goes - the Extreme has performed solidly without skipping a beat since I got it at the start of last year. The T7 has been more umm interesting. I've had it less than a year, and in that time the data (TM backups) has become corrupted 3 times without warning. It hasn't been a practical option to recover data (just takes too long), and I have another backup (iDrive, cloud). So I've just reformatted and started over each time. What the cause of that might be is another matter (I think). But I assume it doesn't relate to SMART or drive health, since the Samsung Magician app says it's hunky dorey. Either way, no help from DriveDx or any of the others with any of that.
I think that about covers it. Is there something I'm missing that might make S.M.A.R.T. etc work better for me with these ext SSDs? What have others found? (I should clarify - As the noob I am, I'm not likely to fare well with any really geeky CLI or coding solutions, though I don't mind trying. GUI apps preferred). Thanks.
