[Anubis IV]

I have an 800MHz Titanium PowerBook that claims to have a "Failing" S.M.A.R.T. Status (as stated in Disk Utility and System Profiler), which normally would be reason to be a bit worried, but the thing is, that technology wasn't used in Apple's laptops (at least to my knowledge) at the time that my Titanium was made, and a call to Apple a few weeks ago confirmed that the hard drive that came with my Titanium did not, in fact, support that technology. The thing is (and I wish I had remembered it when I called Apple...shame I just remembered last night), my original hard drive was replaced by Apple a few months after I got the computer (would've been at the end of 2002 that it was replaced), and now I worry that it might have been replaced with a newer model that does support S.M.A.R.T. and that this "Failing" status might not be a glitch with the software, but rather an actual problem.

To support that idea further, I did a clean installation between Panther and Tiger, so if it had been a software glitch with Disk Utility I'd have expected it to have been cleaned out, but it still says "Failing", despite the clean install and then upgrade to Tiger.

The only thing I know about the hard drive that I have in the computer now is the information provided by System Profiler (Model: TOSHIBA MK4018GAS, Revision: Q1.03 B), and a quick search of the net didn't turn up any information that I saw regarding S.M.A.R.T.

So, should I be worried about the Failing S.M.A.R.T. Status that my computer has?

[ChrisF]

Originally Posted by Anubis IV

So, should I be worried about the Failing S.M.A.R.T. Status that my computer has?

Yes, you should. Back it up right away and put a replacement in there. You're on borrowed time.
SMART has been around since before the PB G4 800, but Apple hadn't implemented it until later.

[tooki]

Indeed, SMART has been around far longer than the TiBook. If the drive didn't have SMART, Disk Utility would not display any info about it. It is true that Apple didn't have SMART support in their OS back then, but they do now, and when it says something's going south, believe it! (Conversely, though, just because it hasn't detected an error does not mean the drive is 100% -- some errors go undetected until catastrophic failure.)

tooki