#DRIVE GENIUS DISKWARRIOR PRO#
#DRIVE GENIUS DISKWARRIOR SOFTWARE#
#DRIVE GENIUS DISKWARRIOR MAC#

But as long as your Mac is running Lion or Mountain Lion, you don’t need a second drive simply restart while holding -R to use OS X Recovery, which boots your Mac from a hidden partition (or, in some cases, over the Internet) so you can run Disk Utility. But that solves most directory problems.ĭisk repair always requires you to start up from a separate volume. There’s not much to do in DiskWarrior except to choose a disk and click Rebuild.

#DRIVE GENIUS DISKWARRIOR PRO#

Drive Genius and TechTool Pro can create a bootable duplicate of your disk and securely erase free space, and Drive Genius can also initialize and format drives. The three third-party programs can check a drive’s SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) status, repair disk permissions, and repair at least some types of volume corruption. If you find yourself asking similar questions, I have two answers for you.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.

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I can tell you that my personal copies of DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro are all now several versions out of date, something I once would have found inconceivable.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.

#DRIVE GENIUS DISKWARRIOR SOFTWARE#

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. 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.

Drive genius diskwarrior