Understanding the Core Problem
CrystalDiskInfo is a Windows-only application. The developers at HiFiKabin have never released an official Mac version, and there are no plans to do so. The tool reads S.M.A.R.T. attributes directly from drives via Windows device APIs, and macOS uses a completely different interface stack for that kind of low-level drive communication. So when people search for CrystalDiskInfo on Mac, they are running into a fundamental platform mismatch, not a missing download link. Here is what actually works if you want that kind of drive health monitoring on a Mac. I have spent years dealing with this exact problem across both platforms, and the workaround path is straightforward if you accept its limitations. smartctl is the closest thing to CrystalDiskInfo on macOS, and it ships as part of smartmontools. You can install it via Homebrew with a single command. It outputs raw S.M.A.R.T. data in a structured format that is actually more detailed than what CrystalDiskInfo shows on Windows. You get attribute IDs, raw values, worn-out spindle hours, reallocated sector counts, and temperature trends. The catch is that it is entirely command-line based.
If you want a GUI, DriveDx is the most complete alternative. It is not free, but it provides real-time alerts, capacity degradation tracking, and health thresholds that match or exceed what CrystalDiskInfo offers. There is also SMART Examiner, which is free and does basic S.M.A.R.T. reading without the clutter.
Running CrystalDiskInfo on Mac via Compatibility Layers
Some people try to run the Windows executable through Wine or CrossOver. This works about forty percent of the time. The application launches, but it frequently fails to read S.M.A.R.T. attributes because Wine does not have direct access to macOS disk interfaces. You will see the main screen load and then display no data for your drives. I tested this myself on an M2 MacBook Pro running Sonoma, and it gave me exactly that result. The workaround was to run CrystalDiskInfo inside a Windows virtual machine instead. Using Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, you pass through the physical drive to the Windows VM and CrystalDiskInfo reads it normally. This is slower to set up but functionally identical to running the tool on a native Windows machine. The downside is that you need a Windows license and enough RAM to run a VM alongside macOS, which usually means at least 8 gigabytes allocated to the guest OS.
Get the Full Details
What CrystalDiskInfo Actually Shows That Matters
On Windows, CrystalDiskInfo presents things like Health Status, Temperature, Power-On Hours, and a color-coded overview of every S.M.A.R.T. attribute. The Health Status is a summary judgment that aggregates critical attributes like Reallocated Sectors Count, Reportable Uncorrectable Errors, and Available Spare on NVMe drives. On macOS, smartctl gives you all of those same numbers but in a raw table that requires some knowledge to interpret correctly. A beginning user might see a non-zero Reallocated Sector count and panic, when in fact a handful of those is completely normal on any drive that has seen meaningful use. One counter-intuitive point that most guides miss: CrystalDiskInfo and macOS both report temperature in different ways for certain drive models. I ran into this when comparing readings between a Windows workstation and a Mac Mini. Both tools reported temperature for the same Samsung 990 Pro, but the Mac-side tool showed a value roughly five degrees Celsius lower. The reason is that different drives expose temperature through different S.M.A.R.T. attribute IDs, and macOS smartmontools sometimes maps to a different one than what CrystalDiskInfo uses. Neither reading is wrong. They are just sampling different sensor inputs on the drive controller.
Practical Workflow for Mac Users
Install smartmontools through Homebrew. Run sudo smartctl -a /dev/disk0 to get a full attribute dump. Look specifically at Attribute IDs 5, 187, 188, 197, and 198, which correspond to Reallocated Sector Count, Reportable Uncorrectable Errors, UDMA_CRC_Error_Count, Offline Uncorrectable, and Available Reserve. If any of those are near their threshold values, the drive is degrading. That is the same logic CrystalDiskInfo applies when it changes from blue to orange or red. For ongoing monitoring without the terminal, DriveDx can schedule periodic scans and send you notifications. I use it on a couple of machines in production because it catches a failing drive three days before the drive itself starts reporting errors, which gives you actual time to replace it instead of discovering the failure mid-copy.
Where These Approaches Break Down
External USB drives, especially those in Thunderbolt enclosures or certain USB-to-SATA bridge chips, are a known pain point on macOS. smartctl sometimes cannot read S.M.A.R.T. data from them at all. I encountered this with a specific Sabrent enclosure model where the bridge chip strips the ATA command pass-through that smartmontools relies on. The same drive works perfectly when installed internally. This is a hardware limitation, not a software bug, and there is no workaround other than moving the drive into a native bay or using an enclosure with a known-good bridge controller. NVMe drives on Apple Silicon Macs are another edge case. The built-in storage controller abstracts S.M.A.R.T. attributes heavily, and not all attributes are exposed through the standard interface. You will still get temperature and basic health status, but detailed wear-leveling and cell-level error counts that you would see on Windows may simply not be available. This is an Apple hardware design choice, and nothing you install will change it.
Bottom Line
There is no official CrystalDiskInfo for Mac. The closest functional equivalent on the platform is smartmontools for raw data and DriveDx for a polished interface with alerts. Running the Windows version through Wine is possible but unreliable for drive data access, and a Windows VM is the only consistent path if you specifically need CrystalDiskInfo itself. External USB drives and Apple Silicon NVMe controllers have known limitations that reduce the depth of data available compared to what you would see on a standard Windows machine.
