Micromat Drive Scope Instruction Manual

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It is important that you register Drive Scope if you require technical support or wish to be notied of updates and upgrades. Online
registration is the preferred way to register. It immediately places your information into our user base and saves you the inconve­nience of lling out, stamping, and mailing in the registration. If you purchased Drive Scope from micromat.com, you are automati­cally registered.

Drive Scope Registration

To register online go to:
http://www.micromat.com

Micromat Inc.
5803 Skylane Blvd.
Suite C
Windsor, CA 95492

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©2017 Micromat Incorporated. All rights reserved.

This manual, as well as the software described in it,
is furnished under license and may only be used or
copied in accordance with the terms of such license.
The information in this manual is furnished for
informational use only, is subject to change without
notice and should not be construed as a commit­ment by Micromat Inc. Micromat assumes no re­sponsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies
that may appear in this book.

Except as permitted by such license, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission
of Micromat Inc.

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Table of Contents

About Drive Scope ............................................................... 1

Getting Started...................................................................... 3

System Requirements ................................................................3

Installation ..................................................................................... 3

Using Drive Scope ................................................................ 4

The Drive Scope Interface ........................................................ 4

Information ..............................................................................................5

Attributes ..................................................................................................6

Capabilities...............................................................................................8

Self-Test .....................................................................................................9

SMART Logs .......................................................................................... 11

Menus and Preferences ...........................................................12

SMART Attribute Glossary ............................................... 14

Frequently Asked Questions ..........................................39

Contacting Technical Support ....................................... 42

About Micromat Inc...........................................................43

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About Drive Scope

Drive Scope is an advanced SMART utility for the
Apple Macintosh. SMART (or S.M.A.R.T.) is an acro­nym which stands for Self Monitoring Analysis and
Reporting Technology.

This technology was developed through the eorts
of the SMART Working Group (SWG), a consortium
of major hard disk manufacturers, to increase the
reliability of hard drives. SMART routines are now
incorporated into most new hard disk and solid
state drives. Although the SMART specication was
developed by the SWG, each drive manufacturer
uses their own proprietary routines in their drives.
The routines monitor important drive parameters as
a drive operates and stores the results in the drive’s
SMART registry. An examination and analysis of
these parameters can aid in the prediction of drive
failure. This could provide the warning you need

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to back up your data and repair or replace a drive
before it fails. It is estimated that SMART monitoring
can predict 70% of drive hardware failures before
they occur.

SMART technology monitors a drive as it is used
and looks for unusual behavior. In rotational drives,
the routines keep track of disk performance, bad
sectors, calibration, CRC (data) errors, disk spin-up
time, distance between the head and the disk, tem­perature, features of the media, heads, motor and
servomechanism. For example, motor or bearing
failure can be predicted by an increase in the drive
spin-up time and the number of retries required
to spin-up the drive. Excessive use of error correc­tion routines could indicate a broken drive head or
contamination on the head. Spotting these types of
errors early may prevent future catastrophe.

SMART Technology continues to be utilized for Solid
State Drives (SSDs). Because SMART originated on
rotational drives, some attributes (such as spin­up count) are unused or set to static values, while
others have been added to keep track of potential
failures specic to solid state technology, such as
wear leveling.

The SMART specication also includes drive self-test
routines that can be executed to verify that a drive
is able to accurately read and write data. Drive
Scope includes functionality to execute a self-test
on a drive as well as check on the results stored its
SMART registry. Problems found in either of these
areas can indicate possible impending drive failure.
This advance notice can provide enough time to
back up your data before it becomes inaccessible.

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Getting Started

System Requirements

• AMacintoshcapableofrunningOSX10.8.5orlater

• 2GBRAMorhigherrecommended

(Specications subject to change without notice.)

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Installation

Drive Scope is a self-contained application which
does not require a traditional installer application.
To install, simply drag the application icon to the
Applications folder. Running the Drive Scope ap­plication will install a couple of extra les:

~/Library/Application Support/Drive Scope

~/Library/Preferences/com.micromat.Drive­Scope.plist

An uninstall application is included to remove the
extra les created by running Drive Scope. To unin­stall, simply double-click the uninstall application
icon.

Using Drive Scope

The Drive Scope Interface

Drive Scope runs from an installation on your hard
drive. To launch the program, double-click the Drive
Scope icon. After the program has launched, you
will see the main Drive Scope window.

Drive Scope

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The window contains a table listing available
SMART enabled drives, and a series of tabs which
separate the functions available for each SMART
enabled drive.

Information

The information tab provides an overview of a
drive’s hardware information, capacity, and current
overall SMART status. Each data point is gathered
directly from the drive and displayed beside a
graphic of the drive and the manufacturer logo.
If the drive does not provide a particular piece of
information a “-” is displayed. The data points pro­vided include:

Type: Type of drive, such as SSD (solid state) or
HDD (rotational) - may include form factor and/or
rotational speed

Capacity: Total formatted drive size

Partition Map: Partition map scheme in use on the

drive

Sector Sizes: Bytes used per sector by data - lists
logical and physical values

Device Model: Drive model number

Model Family: Designation of the group of drives

the model belongs to (if available)

LU WWN Device Id: Logical Unit Worldwide Device
identier (if available)

Serial Number: The serial number of the drive

Firmware Version: Current rmware version in-

stalled on the drive

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Connection Bus: Bus used to connect the drive, i.e.
Internal SATA

ATA Version: ATA version information provided by
the drive

SATA Version: SATA version information provided
by the drive

Power On Hours: Time that the drive has been
powered on

Temperature: Current drive temperature

ATA Error Count: The count of all the errors the

drive has encountered for the lifetime of the drive

CRC Error Count: The count of uncorrectable errors
encountered when transfering data across the in­terface, i.e. the drive cables and connectors. Derived
from SMART attribute 199 - see Glossary.

Health: Overall health of the device, as determined
by SMART attributes. Possible values are Passed,
Warning, and Failed. The warning state means that
a SMART attribute classied as ‘critical’ is in a pre-fail
state, and that the drive as a whole may soon enter
a Failed state.

Attributes

The Attributes tab lists the attributes reported by
the drive, along with the values reported for that
attribute. Note that the attribute data is presented

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exactly as it is gathered from the drive, not inter­preted by the software.

NOTE: The rst 13 attribute ID numbers are stan­dardized, and are consistent across the majority of
drives (though not all of the rst 13 attributes are
always implemented). Attributes with ID numbers
higher than thirteen may be implemented dier­ently amongst various manufacturers.

The table column descriptions are below; descrip-

tions for the attributes themselves can be found in
the glossary.

ID #: Identication number for the attribute

Attribute Name: Descriptive name of the SMART

attribute

Value: Normalized value, used to compare with
failure threshold (see below)

Worst: Lowest (or worst) value recorded for the
attribute

Threshold: Point below which the value will trigger
a SMART failure (on certain attributes)

Type: Attribute type is either Old Age or Pre-fail. Old
Age attributes report when the drive has exceeded
its designed life span, but may continue to operate,
whereas Pre-fail attributes tend to be unrelated to
drive age. When a pre-fail attribute reports failure,
this typically means that total drive failure is im-

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minent.

Updated: An Always value means that this at­tribute is checked continuously. An Oine value
means that drive monitors this attribute when in an
‘oine’ mode, when reads or writes are not occur­ring.

When Failed: A Never value indicates that this at­tribute has never reported failure. Failing Now indi-
cates that a failure is currently being reported. In the
past indicates that the attribute had fallen below
the threshold value in the past, but is now reporting
an above-threshold value. In the past is most often
used for temperature related attributes.

Raw Value: The actual value stored on the drive for
a given attribute. Depending on the attribute, the
value may or may not be human-readable.

Min: If the attribute stores minimum and maximum
values, the minimum is stored here.

Max: If the attribute stores minimum and maxi­mum values, the maximum is stored here.

NOTE: Drive manufacturers may be inconsistent in
their implementation of SMART attributes. The glos­sary contains the available details of each SMART
attribute, but the actual implementation on a given
drive may vary from the available documentation.

Capabilities

The Capabilities tab lists the capabilities of the se­lected drive. Available capabilities will have a check
mark icon next to them, while those capabilities
without a check mark are unavailable for that drive.

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Oine Data Collection Status: SMART attribute
data may be collected when the disk is idle or while
the disk is in use. If the SMART data has ever been
collected while the disk is idle, the Oine Data Dol­lection Status will be listed as Completed. If SMART
data has only been collected while the drive is ac­tive, the status will be Never Started.

Oine Data Collection Duration (sec): If SMART
data has been gathered while the disk is idle, this is

the time taken for disk to collect data.

SMART Overall Health Self-Assessment: Reports
passed or failed. The Overall Health Self-Assess­ment is the overall SMART result reported by many
utilities, such as Apple’s Disk Utility.

SMART enabled drives save the 21 most recent test
results, and the Self Test tab lists those results in a
table. The table elds are as follows:

Number: The order of the test in the list. The most
recent are listed rst.

Self Test

The Self Test tab lists the drive’s stored test results
and provides an interface for running the drive’s
internal test routines manually.

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Test Description: The name of the test that was run.
Typically will be either Short oine or Extended
oine.

Status: A description of the result of the test. The re­sult includes the percentage success, and whether
the test was aborted.

Lifetime (Hours): Records the number of hours of
operation that have progressed when the test is
run. The result can be inconsistent for solid state
drives.

LBA of First Error: Lists the Logical Block Address
(LBA) of the rst error encountered during testing. If
no errors are found, the eld is left blank.

Self Test Select

The Self-Test tab also includes controls to manually
initiate the SMART testing built into the drive. The
drop down menu allows choosing between the
Short and Extended oine tests. Clicking Start will
begin the chosen test. During testing, the Cancel
button will be available to stop the test, and the
current progress will be shown. At the conclusion of
the test, the result will be added to the test results
table described above.

Short Oine:

This self-test usually takes about two minutes to
complete. Its purpose is to conrm the read per­formance of the drive and to quickly identify any
possible drive issues. For rotational drives, it con­rms the electrical and mechanical performance.
Electrical checks may include tests of the read/write
circuitry, a test of the read/write heads, and a check
of buer RAM. Mechanical checks include seeking

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and servo on data tracks as well as scanning small
parts of the drive’s surface (area is vendor-specic
and there is a time limit on the test). Lastly, it checks
the list of pending blocks (or sectors) that may have
read errors.

Extended oine:

Sometimes referred to as the Long oine self-test,
this self-test is a much more comprehensive and
thorough version of the Short self-test. Unlike the
Short self-test which only takes about two minutes
to complete, the Extended oine test usually will
take several hours, depending on the read/write
speed of the drive and its size. The Extended oine
self-test can also conrm the result of the Short self­test since the time constraint may not adequately
supply sucient testing time to identify a potential