Granite Digital has released SMARTVue, a suite of hard disk utilities for Mac OS X that monitors your hard drive to report potential problems. The product was first demoed in January at the Macworld Expo and Conference in San Francisco, California.
There are two versions of SMARTVue: SMARTVue pro and SMARTVue lite. SMARTVue pro — which costs US$39.95 for the CD version and $29.95 for an electronic download — includes tools for interacting with the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) features of modern hard disks. It also has tools for benchmarking and testing hard disks and for configuring custom capabilities of Granite Digital’s own FireWire storage products.
The free SMARTVue lite comes with a subset of the hard disk benchmarking and data integrity testing features of the pro version. It’s available for download the Granite Digital Web site. Both the free and pro versions require Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.