4

I just wanted to see some of the SSD parameters on my freshly purchased MacBook Pro retina and found out that SMART support is obviously disabled by default.

Is this intended and if so, why? I'm using smartmontools to read out the information…

> $ smartctl -a /dev/disk0                                                     
smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-apple-darwin14.3.0] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     APPLE SSD SM0256G
Serial Number:    *censored*
LU WWN Device Id: *censored*
Firmware Version: BXW1JA0Q
User Capacity:    251,000,193,024 bytes [251 GB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    Solid State Device
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4c
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Thu Jul  2 08:58:52 2015 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Disabled

EDIT:

It would be great if someone else could also confirm that SMART is disabled by default. You simply have to install smartmontools via brew.

brew install smartmontools

and then check the status via

smartctl -a /dev/disk0 

UPDATE:

Without changing anything, I noticed today that it apparently switched itself to enable. I'm not sure when this happened but I installed several Mac OS X updates, so probably this was fixed by (at least) one of them. Here is the new output:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     APPLE SSD SM0256G
Serial Number:    *censored*
LU WWN Device Id: *censored*
Firmware Version: BXW1JA0Q
User Capacity:    251,000,193,024 bytes [251 GB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    Solid State Device
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4c
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Mon Jan 25 09:09:44 2016 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
6
  • Anyone confirm this is the case for multiple MacBooks? Jul 26, 2015 at 5:09
  • @agentroadkill my MacBook Air (11") has SMART Enabled.
    – DDPWNAGE
    Jul 27, 2015 at 3:06
  • @DDPWNAGE, that's from the factory? We'd need to know your exact model as well as septi's model number to confirm. Jul 28, 2015 at 16:49
  • @agentroadkill Here's the raw output from running smartctl -a /dev/disk0: http://pastebin.com/hSLVJTJz
    – DDPWNAGE
    Jul 29, 2015 at 2:09
  • MacBook Pro 13" Retina Late 2012 (A1425): Disabled from factory.
    – StvnW
    Nov 13, 2016 at 23:57

1 Answer 1

1

You can reenable SMART for a volume by typing the command:

sudo smartctl -s on /dev/disk0
2
  • 1
    I know how to reenable it. The question is, why is it disabled by default? There must be a reason…
    – tamasgal
    Jul 24, 2015 at 6:34
  • Replying to an old thread, but could be useful: OWC SSD-equipped MacBook here, SMART disabled by default. Don't know why.
    – P. N.
    Dec 5, 2021 at 20:36

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .