OWC Smart Alec Software for Checking Mac HDDs or SSDs

OWC announced SMART Alec, a Mac utility that constantly monitors and checks Mac HDDs, SSDs, Firewire disks, and USB drives, warning you in advance if drives are failing or about to fail, so you’ll have time to backup and replace a bad drive.

SMART Alec can help avoid losing years of irreplaceable data from databases, word processing, Excel, PowerPoint and other business files, photos and videos, music compositions, and more.

It is currently available in beta. The free final version of SMART Alec and $9.99 upgrade with additional features will be available in July.

A check engine light for disks, Smart Alec’s warning system employs disk data analysis and predictive failure analysis, working in the background to alert if drives currently have, or are developing problems – before it’s too late and you experience catastrophic disk failure.

It is available in July as a free download from the iTunes App Store, with a $9.99 paid upgrade with additional features, including USB/Firewire disk monitoring, email alerts.

Drives frequently fail – Why wait until disk drive fails to take action?
Although users expect HDDs to last forever, drives can frequently fail for numerous reasons, including overheating, power failures, surges from lightning strikes, water damage, and more. Once a drive fails, it can be virtually impossible or cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to reconstruct sensitive data through a computer technician or data recovery forensics company. Daily backups to a secondary drive are also risky, since unknowingly you may be backing up data from an already corrupted drive or to another drive with problems. Instead of waiting for the drive to fail or just hoping it won’t happen, users rely on SMART Alec’s continual background disk monitoring to protect sensitive data.

SMART Alec free version – Basic features:

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• Predicted-to-fail disk: If your disk is likely to fail in the near future, you’ll get a ‘predicted to fail’ warning.

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• Failing Disk: If your disk is already failing, SMART Alec will tell you right away, giving you time to replace your disk and save your data.

• Test your disk: It will display a green bar by all disks that are healthy. Still worried? Get SMART Alec to re-test disks at any time.

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• Know your disk: All the information about your disk is readily available with a disk log to track your disk’s history.

SMART Alec $9.99 upgrade – Additional features:

• SMART over USB: The free version is for SATA drives only, not USB/FireWire drives. The upgrade adds failure prediction for most USB or FireWire connected drives, including most USB 3 devices.

• Email notifications: In addition to desktop alerts, notifications are also emailed to you about failing or predicted-to-fail disks in case you are away from your disks.

• Blink disk light: A light blinks on the actual disk corresponding to the disk tile you have selected in the Smart Alec application.

• Available through iTunes App Store

The free SMART Alec essential drive utility and $9.99 SMART Alec upgrade with USB/FireWire disk monitoring and other additional features will ship July 2017, with the free version available through the iTunes App store. A Windows version is in development.

Free beta version available.

SMART Alec is currently in its final beta testing stage. To sign up as a beta tester. In future releases of SMART Alec, users will be able to opt-in to share data about disk reliability and performance with self-learning disk failure prediction system, an algorithm which will analyze disk data from users to more accurately predict likely disk failure. Once opted in, users will get access to the up-to-date statistics about the safest-and least safe-disks available and the reliability of the disks they are using. The latest beta (1.0 b26) offers support for OS X 10.9 (Mavericks).