How Can I Monitor S.M.A.R.T. Status (Disk Health) With Disk Drill?

S.M.A.R.T. is a monitoring system built in computer hard disk drives (HDD), solid-state drives (SSDs), and eMMC drives. S.M.A.R.T. is an abbreviation for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, and sometimes you can see it written simply as SMART. This system’s main function is monitoring the drive’s processes while constantly anticipating an imminent hardware failure. When it does detect a possibility of such a failure, a software integrated with it can warn a user of the host system of potential data loss and help them take action before data goes missing.

Without a proper integration with a software that can read and process S.M.A.R.T. data, the gathered information is useless. This is where Disk Drill comes in. As one of our completely free data protection features, we offer S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring.

With S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring turned on, Disk Drill will alert you if any problem is found with your drive that indicates it might fail in the near future. These alerts can help you take action and backup your data before you run into drive failure problems. As we all know, there are many variables that impact file recovery chances, so why not take every opportunity to prevent data loss before it happens? Below are some frequently asked questions about S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring.

S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Setup

How do I Turn S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring ON?

By default, Disk Drill does not monitor your drives for hardware issues. This option should be turned on manually. Whenever you decide you are ready to turn S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on, simply open Disk Drill, in the “Extra tools” panel on the left go to “S.M.A.R.T. monitoring”. Read about this method and watch the introductory video to know more about it. When ready, click “OK, let’s do it” and turn S.M.A.R.T. on with a button at the top of the app window. You’ll then be able to customize additional settings for the monitored drive.

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How do I Turn S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring OFF?

That’s actually as easy as a pie! Simply open the Disk Drill app, go to the “Extra tools” panel on the left and select “S.M.A.R.T. monitoring”. A panel will appear next to the Extra tools that will show the status of S.M.A.R.T. monitoring as ON with the “Turn off” button right there.

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How do I Turn S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring ON for External Devices in macOS?

You may have noticed that in Disk Drill S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring is only activated for your Mac’s internal hard drive by default. There is a way, however, for you to monitor the status of your external drives as well. It involves downloading a free third-party app called SAT SMART Driver.

How Do I Turn S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring OFF for External Devices in macOS?

To turn S.M.A.R.T. off for external devices you need to uninstall SAT SMART Driver. Here’s how to uninstall this additional module:

1. On macOS 10.11+ – type the following commands (in Terminal.app):
   sudo rm -r /Library/Extensions/SATSMARTDriver.kext
   sudo rm -r /Library/Extensions/SATSMARTLib.plugin
2. If using macOS version older than 10.11, execute the following commands in Terminal:
   sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTDriver.kext
   sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTLib.plugin
3. After executing the commands, restart your Mac.

How to Enable Extended S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring in Disk Drill for Windows

By default, Disk Drill for Windows can’t read S.M.A.R.T. data from external RAID enclosures that use JMicron JMS56x or JMB39x controllers. These controllers power many USB-to-SATA RAID docks and drive enclosures, but their SMART attributes aren’t exposed through standard APIs. Enabling Disk Drill’s Extended S.M.A.R.T. option forces the app to query these controllers directly—so you can monitor health statistics and spot potential drive failures before they happen.

To turn on Extended S.M.A.R.T.:

1. Open Disk Drill and navigate to Extra Tools → S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring.
2. Toggle on “Show extended options inside” to enable the JMicron-specific queries.

With Extended S.M.A.R.T. enabled, Disk Drill will regularly poll JMS56x/JMB39x–based enclosures for full SMART attributes, helping you maintain optimal disk health and prevent data loss.

How to Change Temperature Units in Disk Drill’s S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring

Disk Drill automatically detects your system’s regional settings and displays temperatures in the appropriate units (Celsius or Fahrenheit). To manually switch between °C and °F:

1. Open Disk Drill and navigate to Extra Tools → S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring.
2. At the bottom of the disk list, click °C or °F to toggle your preferred temperature unit.

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How to Enable or Disable the S.M.A.R.T. Icon in macOS Menu Bar and Windows System Tray

🍏 Disk Drill for macOS

When enabled in Disk Drill, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring will add an icon to the top-right of your menu bar for easy access to information about your hard drive as well as S.M.A.R.T. settings. The default icon either looks like a small gear ⚙️ or a token 🚥 with temperature info and a light indicator, depending on the settings you choose in the app. To modify this:

1. Click the S.M.A.R.T. icon in the menu bar and select “Go to Disk Drill“.
2. Go to “Extra Tools” in the left panel of the app window and select S.M.A.R.T. monitoring.
3. Select a drive and disable “Show in the menu bar” option to only keep the basic S.M.A.R.T. menu (looks like a gear in this case). Enabling it changes the gear icon to a temperature token and shows extended data about your disk’s health.
4. To completely hide the S.M.A.R.T. icon from the menu bar, click it and use the “Hide temporarily” option. This will hide the icon from the menu bar until the next macOS restart.

🪟 Disk Drill for Windows

Unlike the macOS edition, Disk Drill for Windows only performs S.M.A.R.T. health checks while the app is running—there’s no background service. All S.M.A.R.T. settings apply exclusively to the live application:

1. Open Disk Drill and go to Extra Tools → S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring.
2. In the top-right corner of the SMART Monitoring window, toggle “Show status in system tray” on or off depending on your preference.
3. Click the Disk Drill icon in the system tray to view basic disk health information at a glance.
4. Alternately, disable health monitoring for any drive by opening the system tray menu, hovering over the desired disk, and selecting “Disable monitoring“.

With these two simple steps, you can control whether Disk Drill displays your drives’ S.M.A.R.T. health icons in the Windows system tray.

How Do I View the S.M.A.R.T. Status Information

Way #1: From the Disk Drill Interface

To stay on top of your drive’s health, Disk Drill provides a built-in S.M.A.R.T. monitoring dashboard. Here’s how to review every SMART attribute and catch potential failures early:

1. Launch Disk Drill and select Extra Tools in the main window.
2. Click S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring to open the health dashboard.
3. In the list of connected drives, click a disk’s name to expand its full S.M.A.R.T. table.
4. Review individual attributes—temperature, reallocated sectors, wear leveling count, and more—to gauge overall drive health.
5. If Disk Drill detects a critical issue, you’ll see a red alert icon next to the drive along with a clear error message and description.

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By regularly checking S.M.A.R.T. data in Disk Drill, you can spot early warning signs—like increasing bad sectors or temperature spikes—before they lead to data loss.

Fast-Track Access to Problematic Drives’ S.M.A.R.T. Data

Disk Drill also gives you a one-click way to zero in on drives that need attention. In the Storage Devices list, any disk with a detected health issue is highlighted in red and marked with a ❗ icon. Simply click that icon to jump straight to the S.M.A.R.T. parameters for that drive—no need to sift through healthy disks. This streamlined workflow helps you prioritize drive checks and address critical alerts before they turn into data loss disasters.

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Way #2: Monitor Drive Health from the S.M.A.R.T. Icon in Your Menu Bar or System Tray

Disk Drill adds a small S.M.A.R.T. status indicator to your macOS menu bar or Windows system tray, so you can check drive health at a glance:

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• 🔴 Red or 🟡 Yellow means that S.M.A.R.T. is active, however bad sectors or other S.M.A.R.T. issues have been detected.
• 🟢 Green also means that S.M.A.R.T. is active and it hasn’t detected any problems.

Click the icon to open Disk Drill’s health dashboard and review S.M.A.R.T. attributes. This always-on, color-coded alert system ensures you catch potential SSD or HDD failures before they lead to data loss.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) Explained

Most S.M.A.R.T. attributes are standardized across drive manufacturers, so whether you’re using a Seagate HDD, a Samsung SSD, or another brand, you can reliably read key metrics like temperature and total power-on hours. Your drive’s firmware constantly polls onboard sensors, processes the raw readings through manufacturer-specific algorithms, and updates each S.M.A.R.T. attribute accordingly.

A typical S.M.A.R.T. attribute record includes:

• Current (6 bytes). The unprocessed sensor or counter output. Depending on the attribute, these 48 bits may be split into low, mid, and high segments to track different data types—such as error counts, temperature, or run-out cancellations.
• Value (1 byte). A manufacturer-defined “health score,” usually starting near a maximum (e.g., 100, 200, or 253) on a new drive and decreasing as wear or errors accumulate.
• Threshold (1 byte). The failure limit. When the normalized health value drops below this threshold, the firmware flags the attribute as critical.
• Status. Indicators that classify each attribute as either: Pre-failure (predictive of imminent hardware failure), Statistical (tracking long-term wear but not directly predictive) and OK.

A S.M.A.R.T. attribute is considered healthy when its normalized Value meets or exceeds its Threshold. If a critical attribute’s value drops below its threshold, the drive is flagged as failing and should be replaced immediately—this attribute pinpoints the specific issue. Under most warranties, manufacturers will replace a failing hard drive. Modern BIOS implementations use S.M.A.R.T. to warn you of impending drive failure before your operating system even boots.

Key ATA S.M.A.R.T. Attributes

Below is a list of commonly supported ATA S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Higher normalized values typically indicate better drive health (except for temperature and load/unload cycles, where lower is better). Use this table to interpret the metrics shown by Disk Drill`s monitoring tool.

Key NVMe S.M.A.R.T. Attributes

NVMe drives implement S.M.A.R.T. through a set of standardized attributes that report critical health and usage metrics. Below is the complete list of known NVMe S.M.A.R.T. attributes, including their byte offsets, data lengths, names, and clear descriptions to help you monitor and analyze your drive’s condition.

How S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Impacts Your Drives and Disk Drill Scans

Enabling S.M.A.R.T. monitoring in Disk Drill has zero impact on your system performance or resource usage. It won’t slow down your scans, and it runs so efficiently that you can spot drive issues—like rising bad-sector counts or overheating—long before they lead to data loss.

Disk Drill’s S.M.A.R.T. monitoring updates disk information regularly:

• in menu bar (macOS) – once every 2️⃣ minutes;
• in system tray (Windows) – once every 5️⃣ minutes;
• In Disk Drill disk list – once every 5️⃣ minutes.

If you do choose to monitor internal drives, we recommend keeping S.M.A.R.T. turned off whenever you connect potentially problematic external disks. That way, you avoid unnecessary polling of unstable drives and can focus Disk Drill’s health checks where they matter most. When you’re done working with those externals, simply re-enable S.M.A.R.T. monitoring to resume proactive disk health tracking.

What Mechanism Does Disk Drill for macOS Use to Integrate With S.M.A.R.T.

Disk Drill for macOS works with Smartmontools – a library that can control and monitor storage systems using SMART technology. Source code tarballs and precompiled packages of Smartmontools for Darwin (macOS) are available here. Disk Drill users on macOS can change the default package of smartmontools whenever they need to do so – this allows using any custom-compiled or any other version of the tool.

To choose which version of Smartmontools package you want Disk Drill for macOS to use, follow these steps:

1. Download the required precompiled package of Smartmontools.
2. Mount the downloaded .dmg file and install the .pkg file from it.
3. By default the smartmontools package is installed to:
   ➡️ For newer macOS versions – /usr/local/sbin/
   ➡️ For older mac OS X versions – /usr/local/bin/
4. Copy the path to the smartctl executable from step 3 (a or b). You’ll need it in step 6. An example of how the path looks like: /usr/local/sbin/smartctl
5. Open Terminal.
6. Execute the following command:
   defaults write com.cleverfiles.DiskDrill SmartmontoolsPath "PATH_TO_EXECUTABLE_FROM_STEP_3"