If you want to ensure good health for your Mac one useful tool is Stellar Drive Monitor from Stellar Data Recovery (http://tinyurl.com/by8a535 ). It’s a scanning, monitoring and backup utility for the Mac that constantly runs in the background.
Stellar Drive Monitor scans and monitors your drive (internal drives only, not external ones) to identify possible problems and issue warnings. The software has the ability to read SMART attributes to perform an overall health assessment of your hard disk. You can check individual disk parameters to determine when a risk of failure lurks in your system. The tool can display SMART information for all internal hard disks.
The System Monitoring software gives you a summarized report of the disk analysis performed in the background. It displays general information about your hard disk or individual partitions on this disk, including drive title, size, free space, SMART Status, and more.
You can set desired preferences in the software (such as temperature warning limit, startup option, system shutdown) to make sure you are well aware of the current state of your hard disk at any given point. Also, you can save this report as a text file in your system if you wish.
Stellar Drive Monitor goes through a detailed block-level scanning of the hard disk to scout out bad sectors by marking them with a distinct color. By default, all the bad sectors on your disk will display as “red” in color. You can change this color scheme according to your convenience to more easily identify sector corruption on the disk.
Stellar Drive Monitor also incorporates a feature ‘Drive Performance’ to allow checking the performance levels of any selected disk or volume by the process of sequential read/write or sustained read/write. You can see the minimum, average, or maximum performance levels using a bar graph, line graph, or Raw data representation.
However, you should note that Stellar Drive Monitor doesn’t support RAID hard drives.
The utility is available in a try-before-you-buy version with almost all its features available for 30 days. Stellar Drive Monitor’s single user license is available for US$29.