Strategies to Maximize the Life of Your Mac Hard Drive

by Alex Bezborodov



Maximize the life of your Mac hard drive



Although Macs are often deemed the most user-friendly computers,
many Mac users do not know much about computer maintenance. This
is because Mac OS cleverly hides all the cumbersome applications
it runs to keep the system secure and healthy. Unfortunately,
while this maintains Apple's signature look and feel, it also
takes away the user's ability to easily monitor and maintain the
health of their computer. Below, I recommend several procedures
that can be performed by most Mac users without much difficulty,
which will help safeguard your computer from data loss.



Be SMART, Monitor your hard drives



SMART stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting
Technology and allows you to run diagnostics on your hard drive
to determine if a failure is imminent. In order to run the tool,
launch Disk Utility (Applications: Utilities) and click on the
top level indicator for your drive in the left-hand column. In
the bottom of the window, you should see something like "SMART
Status: Verified". If you do not see "SMART status" at all, your
Mac does not support the technology. If you see "SMART status"
but do not see "Verified", your drive may be at risk of imminent
failure. In this case, your best bet is to back up your data and
replace the drive. This simple, but often overlooked procedure
may save you from losing your data. One other thing worth noting
is that although there is a myriad of 3rd party applications
that can run these diagnostics automatically, be advised that
using such utilities in the event of a hardware failure can
cause extensive damage to the drive.



Clean up files



This is pretty self-explanatory and is applicable to all
computer users - take some time to organize your files on a
regular basis. Clean up any downloads or files from your desktop
and place the files into appropriate folders. This will not only
save time, but will also protect you from losing files due to
bad sectors.



UNIX Maintenance Scripts



Mac OS uses automatic maintenance routines called maintenance
scripts to clean up system log files and other temporary files.
The three scripts are designed to run daily, weekly and monthly.
The problem is that these scripts are set by default to run late
at night when most Macs are either off or sleeping. If the
computer is off or in sleep mode during this time, the scripts
will not run and the log files will grow in size, clogging up
the startup disk and slowing down performance. The good news is
there are a number of 3rd party programs that exist that allow
the user to set different times at which to run the scripts,
including MacJanitor (v.1.3 or later for Tiger) and Anacron
among others.



I will be reviewing these titles and many others in the weeks to
come so stay tuned. In the meantime, visit our website to learn more about
Mac maintenance, data recovery tips, and other useful stuff.




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