S.M.A.R.T. ( Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology ; often written as SMART ) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. On Mac OS X : The following command will report the SMART status on Mac OS X $ diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART The output will look like some thing below : SMART Status: Verified If the output says "F ailing " or " About to Fail ", other than "Verified" then you might need to backup data and try repairing the disk or replacing the disk. On Linux : $ smartctl -d ata -H /dev/sdb This command will run overall-health self-assessment test on your hard disk and prints a report of disk test results.