Disabling SMART Disk Utility Warning Message

Question

The Disk Utility pop-up the same message so many times and too many at a time. The message is the same "Hard Disk Problem Detected. A hard disk is reporting health problems." The hard disk has previous bad sectors and S.M.A.R.T. ran out of allocated resource to replace them. The hard disk it still usable (being using it with 10.10 for half a year without any problem.

How can I turn off this annoying pop up.

Solution

You have between 0% and 5% that what Disk Utility says about your hard drive is wrong. The other 95% is that your hard drive might be dying. Now to calm you, the alarm will pop up when it detects a problem with the SMART (ANY of the many problems a hard drive can have with it...even little ones like some cluster/sector/block has something bad).

My example is 2 Hard drives that in Ubuntu 10.04 one of them happen to have some horrible problems and the alarm came out EVERY SINGLE TIME Ubuntu booted. In Ubuntu 10.10 the problem went away since Disk Utility had a problem with some 1TB HDDs. It was solved, but since this is a software that checks for SMART data, this does not give 100% guarantee that your hard drive is bad, dying or damaged. You can click on the Hard Drive and then click the SMART Data button. That should mention the type of problem you have and how many bad sectors you have.

NOTE: If you have around 500 bad sectors, I suggest you start checking for a new hard drive. If you have like 2000 to 5000 sectors I REALLY suggest you get up from your chair, run to the nearest PC Vendor and buy a Hard Drive... quickly!.

Now for your answer.

1. Open the Disk utility. (On 11.10 or 11.04 using Unity press SUPER and type disk utility). For 12.04, 12.10 and up simply type disks
2. Click on the Hard Drive that has the problem
3. Click on the SMART Data Button (On 12.04+ look for an icon that shows advanced options. The SMART options should be there).
4. On the lower left corner of the SMART Data window click on Don't warn if the disk is failing

Some Images to help you:

Disk Utility Opened - Selecting the Failing Disk

Selecting SMART Data Button

Clicking on the Don't warn if the disk is failing

After this, everytime you boot you will not get a warning for THAT Hard Drive.

For my experience i would stay away from some Seagates (NOT ALL. The Barracuda ones rock on) and REALLY and Specially from all Western Digital Caviar Models. Am sorry to say but no matter how they paint them, they suck. They have the highest overall of failure for all drives in history. I have seen more Caviar fail to heat, time powered on and heavy copy than any other drives. I was a Quantum follower, then a Maxtor follower (For obvious "bought quantum" reasons and now a Seagate follower. Although i read a lot Toms Hardware and have found out that Samsung and Hitachi are getting REALLY good.

In 12.10+ the message does not appear by default, so the need to disable it is not needed.

Comments

[zhao0419]

Thank you so much @CYREX. The only error reported by SMART is that too many reallocated sectors count of bad sectors. The value stays fix for as long as I can remember (a 40GB harddisk from the 40GB era). Have re-used this drive for almost 6 months without any increase of bad sectors or the bad sector hang/freeze. As I have use it with 10.10, you're right, the default setting for the warning notification is OFF. Now no more SPAMMING NOTICES from the disk utility app. Thanks a ton.

[Luis Alvarado]

If it correctly helped, check the answer as the correct answer. Glad to help. Also for an old hard drive you are doing great in taking care of it so do not worry about so much about the bad sectors.