So I got a new disk drive, it is a hitachi 40 Gb Model HTS548040M9AT00. It has
a problem. I thought "This drive is making funny noises", so I
took it out and put it back in again, thinking that I had screwed up the
installation. But it still made "funny" noises. So I looked for a
S.M.A.R.T. tool for Mac OS X that would tell me in advance that the drive would
fail. I found SMARTReporter
but it was not quite what I wanted.
So I looked around for info. google was
very helpful, as usual and provided a draft spec for the ATA/ATAPI-6 spec.
Hitachi was also good with their drive spec sheet. So I wrote Maxwell to check out the drive.
All is well, you say, well not exactly. The drive says it has a Load/Unload
Cycle Count of 16251, and that it is guaranteed to last at least 300,000 load/
unload cycles… lets see, it has been installed for 20 days, that means that
it will exceed 300,000 load/unload cycles in about a year… Hmm..
Update: Just released maxwell-0.5.1, really need to try the install target
in future.