Check Health Status of your Mac’s Hard Drive in Easy Steps

The hard drive is a major source of secondary memory on a computer, facilitating data storage to large extent. Just like every other electronic and mechanical component, hard drives are subject to logical corruption due to power failure, master boot record corruption, and failure due to physical damages. Though you cannot prevent the hard drive failure or corruption, you can avoid data loss by frequently checking the hard drive volume status with Disk Utility. If some errors are reported, you can make necessary repairs right over there.

You must refer to S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) Status of the hard drive on Disk Utility, which reports the reliability and expected failure. You might not know where and how to check hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status; therefore, follow the steps discussed below:

• Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)
• Select the hard drive in the left pane.
• Now, look for the S.M.A.R.T. Status in the bottom pane under First Aid tab

• If it says Verified, then drive is OK
• Else, you need to repair the drive in Recovery Mode

Note: S.M.A.R.T. status belongs to the hard disk drive, not to an individual volume. Therefore, you cannot judge exactly where the corruption is.

Most likely, the corruption is in single volume (could be in boot volume) and you verify and repair the entire hard drive, which are time- as well as resource-consuming processes. You can individually check the health status of every Mac volume with Disk Utility, though. For this,

• Launch Disk Utility.
• Select a volume (non-boot) in the left pane.
• In the First Aid tab at the right, click Verify Disk and wait for the process to finish.

• If you see some Red instructions (indicating errors) in the Show detail area, then click Repair Disk
• Else, the volume is OK.

• Repeat these steps for each non-boot volume

To check the health status of the boot volume, you need to boot the Mac in Recovery Mode. To do this, Restart your Mac and hold Command + R Keys during startup.

• Choose a preferred Language and continue.
• Launch Disk Utility in the Utilities menu.
• Select boot volume (listed as Macintosh HD) and click Repair Disk

Depending on the size of boot volume, the process could be long and you have to wait. After the repair is finished, exit Disk Utility and boot Mac normally. If you do not get the drive or the volume repaired, it is recommended to back up your data and replace the disk with a new one.