[OT] Does anyone have any views on MacKeeper

In article , Diesel
wrote:

Not a bad idea to check the drive with SMART Utility by
Volitans Software before putting your data back on it. The
mechanism might be starting to fail...

smart is only useful to confirm a failure, not to predict a
failure.


SMART creates a descriptive report which if analysed correctly
can be used to help predict failure. This is because certain
SMART errors correlate with disk failure.

that may be true, but it doesn't predict anything. it only can
confirm what has already happened. anything other than that is a
guess.

Not entirely true. SMART is capable of warning you in advance that
the drive has reported a serious problem and is failing. I've seen
several PCs warn you about S.M.A.R.T status, suggesting you backup
your data immediately and press an F key to resume booting.

a drive doesn't have to be totally dead to be considered failed. if
smart is reporting serious problems, then the drive has failed.

the point is that a drive can fail at any time, even when smart says
it's fine.

In article , RJH wrote:


a hard drive can fail at any time for a variety of reasons, even if
smart says it's fine, and a hard drive with reported errors might run
for longer than one might expect.


Would you continue to run a disk where SMART was reporting reallocation
errors, spin retries and read/write errors on the basis that it might
run without issue?

Or would you take the information as a decent enough proxy of failure?

no, because that drive has failed.

the point is that when smart *doesn't* show any errors, it doesn't mean
the drive won't fail. it can fail at any time, for any reason.

always have backups.