OWC Announces Free SMART Alec Essential Utility for Mac Drives to Predict Drive Failure

OWC has announced SMART Alec, al Mac utility that constantly monitors and checks your Mac hard drives, SSDs, Firewire disks, and USB drives, warning you in advance if drives are failing or about to fail, so youll have plenty of time to back up and replace a bad drive. SMART Alec can help you avoid losing years of sensitive, irreplaceable data from databases, word processing, Excel, PowerPoint and other business files, precious photos and videos, music compositions, and more. SMART Alec is currently available in beta at: http://smartalec.biz/beta_test. The free final version of SMART Alec and $9.99 upgrade with additional features will be available in July.

A check engine light for your disks, Smart Alecs Advanced Warning System employs Disk Data Analysis and Predictive Failure Analysis, quietly working in the background to alert you if your drives currently have, or are developing problems — before its too late and you experience catastrophic disk failure. SMART Alec 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, and more.

Drives Frequently Fail — Why Wait Until a Disk Drive Fails to Take Action?

Although users expect hard drives 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 back-ups 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 wont happen, users rely on SMART Alec’s continual background disk monitoring to protect sensitive data –Why wait until a disk drive fails to take action?

SMART Alec Free Version – Basic Features:

PREDICTED-TO-FAIL DISK: If your disk is likely to fail in the near future, youll get a predicted to fail warning.
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 crucial data.
TEST YOUR DISK: SMART Alec will display a green bar by all disks that are healthy. Still worried? Get SMART Alec to re-test disks at any time.
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 (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) 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. For more information, see https://www.smartalec.biz/ or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SMARTAlec.biz/.

Free Beta Version Available Now

SMART Alec is currently in its final beta testing stage. To sign up as a beta tester, go to smartalec.biz/beta_test. In future releases of SMART Alec, users will be able to opt-in to share data about disk reliability and performance with SMART Alec’s 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 most up-to-date statistics about the safestand least safedisks available and the reliability of the disks they are using. The latest beta, SMART Alec 1.0 b26, offers support for OS X 10.9 (Mavericks).

Source: OWC