![]() ![]() No! Disk utilities are a waste!Īs I look over the feature lists of the major disk utilities, I find it striking that they all advertise capabilities that Disk Utility already offers for free. If you find yourself asking similar questions, I have two answers for you. I’m asking myself, “Should I bother paying for upgrades? Will I ever even use them?” Whatever the reasons, I can tell you that my personal copies of DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro are all now several versions out of date, something I once would have found inconceivable. In addition, Disk Utility has gained a number of new features in recent years, and it can now repair faults that might once have been out of its reach. I credit these and other improvements to OS X with the reduced frequency of disk errors. (Solid-state drives don’t require such defragging.) And, when you perform a safe boot (starting your Mac with the Shift key held down), OS X runs a more extensive set of diagnostic and repair procedures without you doing anything else. OS X performs certain disk maintenance tasks automatically in the background-for example, it defragments smaller files on the fly, keeping all their segments contiguous on a hard disk so they’ll load faster. One reason is that Apple has made ongoing hardware and software improvements that keep disks running happily more of the time. Regardless of those details, when your disk is misbehaving, you probably don’t care if you have an invalid B-tree node size or an overlapped extent allocation you just want the symptoms to go away. (Directory damage, perhaps the most common type of disk error, can produce symptoms such as missing or inaccessible files, applications that won’t launch, and startup problems.) Most of these tools can also repair a partition map, which is a chunk of data that describes how data is to be stored on a disk and many can repair certain kinds of errors with individual files, too (such as damaged preference files). Does that advice still make sense?ĭisk utilities claim to be able to fix problems involving a volume’s directory, which keeps track of where all your files and folders are. Yet for many years conventional wisdom held that you also needed at least one third-party disk repair utility on hand to solve the problems Disk Utility couldn’t. Of course, the problem could still lie elsewhere.OS X’s Disk Utility-which enables you to format, partition, repair, and perform other kinds of maintenance on disks (including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images)-is good for what it does. Surface Scan test – scan in progress SMART check – results If failures are found with either of these tests, then the disk is physically damaged, and will need to be replaced. In this case, either the SMART check or the Surface Scan test can identify hardware problems with the disk. If the volume structures test doesn’t find any problems, but you’re still thinking it’s a disk problem, then it might be the hardware of the disk itself. Checking Volume Structures Volume Rebuild Tool – Disk repair in progress Physical disk damage The Volume Structures test in Techtool Pro can be used to identify this damage, while the Volume Rebuild tool can be used to repair it. Volume Structures damage (or directory damage for recovering Windows users) refers to the data stored on a disk that keeps track of your photos, movies, music, and other files on the disk. If you suspect a hard drive problem, it will be one of two things: 1) Volume Structures damage or 2) Physical disk damage. Slow performance, sudden application crashes, even computer crashes can be attributed to a malfunctioning hard drive. Both solid state and rotational hard drives can be the most error-prone components in your Mac. If your Mac is running slowly, crashing, or just generally misbehaving, the problem may be your disk. ![]()
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