Keeping you Mac's hard drive or SSD healthy is hugely important. By monitoring and checking your Mac hard drive's health, you can anticipate potential problems and prevent potentially catastrophic crashes. How do you know if your Mac is working properly?
Fortunately, there are a number of tools available that allow to to check the health of a drive and fix problems before they become serious.
- WD Drive Utilities for Windows. WD Security for Windows. WD SmartWare. Western Digital SSD Dashboard. Software for Mac GoodSync for WD. Install WD Discovery for Mac. WD Drive Utilities for Mac. WD Security for Mac. Product Firmware Product. If your product is.
- Jan 07, 2020 Now that you know what causes hard drive failure, we have for you a list of top 6 best HDD repair software tools that you can use to analyze, avoid, and solve virtually all common hard drive issues. Best Overall Hard Drive Repair Software: Disk Drill. Choosing the best overall hard drive repair software.
Best Apps to Check Your Mac Hard Drive Health
Absolute Must for the OS 'Toolkit'! I was having some serious issues with an SSD hybrid drive on my macbook pro, and well since seagate doesn't support mac, their 'seatools' software was useless (and required) for getting a proper exchange. That one event way more than paid for the price of the software.
One of the best apps for alerting you to potential problems is iStat Menus, available in Setapp. Once you've installed it, iStatMenus sits in your Mac's menu bar and monitors not just your hard drive, but its CPU, RAM and network traffic, among other things.
iStat Menus, and the other disk monitoring tools available for macOS, monitor what is knows as SMART status. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and is installed on most hard drives and SSDs. In order to use it, you need software to analyze and display what it finds, and that's where iStatMenus comes in.
Monitoring SMART reports won't prevent your hard drive from failing, but it will reduce the likelihood of problems occurring.
Tap on iPad/iPhone StorageDepending on which type of iOS device you have, tap on the “Storage” entry, prefaced by the appropriate device descriptor. That will bring up the general settings menu for your iOS device. Iphone save apps to mac.
Note: As of 2016, Apple no longer allows software tools to check the SMART status of an SSD. So iStatMenus won't repot anything on Macs shipped in 2016 or later.
There are other steps you can take to keep your hard drive or SSD healthy. CleanMyMac X has a number of maintenance routines. While most of them are designed to keep your Mac running smoothly, one of them is an excellent way to keep your hard drive in good shape.
How to verify Startup disk
- Launch Setapp, search for CleanMyMac, and open it.
- When CleanMyMac has launched, look on the left hand side of its window for the Speed section and click Maintenance.
- Click the check box next to 'Repair Disk Permissions' to verify startup disk and then click the 'Run' button at the bottom of the window.
- Click OK in the dialog box that opens. Click 'Run' again. View the result
Identifying bad sectors with Disk Drill
Sectors are blocks of space on a disk drive and bad sectors are blocks that cannot be read because, for whatever reason, they're damaged. When Disk Drill attempts to recover data from a hard drive that's failed or one where you've mistakenly deleted files, it marks sectors it can't read from as bad. That means that it won't try to recover data from them in the future.
You can't fix bad sectors, the drive's firmware should identify them and prevent them from being written to. If there's data stored in them and you need to recover it, you're out of luck. But by monitoring how many of them there are on a drive, you can keep an eye on its health and decide whether it's time to replace it, if the number of bad sector starts to increase quickly.
Here's how to identify bad sector in Disk Drill:
![Mac Hard Drive Test Software Mac Hard Drive Test Software](https://static.binaryfruit.com/images/drivedx/overview/slides/DriveDx-2-drives-dashboard-1-warning-ssd-samsung@2x.png)
- Open Disk Drill app in Setapp. When it launches, it will ask if you want to 'Monitor my disks for hardware issues'. Say Yes. If you already have Disk Drill installed but didn't check that option when you launched it the first time, go to the Preferences, click the SMART tab and check the box next to 'Monitor my disks for hardware issues.'
- Start a recovery session. In Disk Drill's main window, select the volume 'Macintosh HD', or whatever you've called your Mac's hard drive. Click Recover. Let the recover session run and complete.
- Check bad sectors. Once the recovery session has completed and saved, go back to the main Disk Drill window. Click the gear icon next to the drive you ran the recovery session on and click the bottom item on the menu 'Specify bad blocks.' This tool is designed to allow you to tell Disk Drill which blocks are bad and you don't want it to scan, but it will also display bad sectors it has identified.
How to avoid problems from an unhealthy hard drive
You should always backup your hard drive regularly, but it's even more important to do it when you suspect your hard drive is having problems. If you identify problems with a hard drive using any of the steps above, you should consider increasing the frequency of your backups and test them to make sure you can recover data if you need to – a backup routine is useless if you can't restore data. You should also consider using Get BackUp Pro to make a complete clone of the drive, that way, in an emergency you can boot from the clone and be back up and running immediately. Click here to read about how to backup your Mac. Get Backup Pro, also available in Setapp, is an excellent tool for making regular backups.
How to recover from a failed hard drive
If it's already too late and your hard drive has failed and lost data, you should try to recover the data before you do anything else.
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Knitting pattern design software for mac. Jul 08, 2020 • Filed to: Answer Hard Drive Problems • Proven solutions
Do you want to carry out a hard drive speed test for your Windows or Mac? You are probably wondering which hard drive speed tester is the best for your Mac or your Windows. Below is top selections software to test your hard drive speed. You can choose the best hard drive speed tester from the top 6 hard drive speed test software for Windows and the top 4 for Mac. If you meet problems of data lost due to hard drive, go looking at our solutions for Windows and for Mac.
Part 1. Top 6 Hard Drive Speed Test Software for Windows
1. HD Tach
If you want to perform a hard drive speed test for your windows device, the HD Tach is here http://www.techspot.com/downloads/6714-hdtach.html
The main features of this hard drive tester include:
- It reads from all areas in the hard drive
- Provides an average speed report
- It logs read speeds to a text file for loading in a spreadsheet
- Performs sequential as well as random reads
- It also tests the burst speed of the drive
How to use HD Tach to test hard drive speed?
- Download the application and install it into your device
- Open the installation folder and then right-click on HD Tach
- On the Compatibility tab, select Windows XP ( Service Pack 3) and then click run this program as administrator
Run the application and click run test
When the test is complete, you will see the screen appearing in this manner
2. ATTO Disk Benchmark
Features of ATTO Disk hard speed tester includes:
- It can transfer sizes up to 64 MB and lengths up to 32 GB
- Supports overlapped I/O
- Its time mode provides room for continuous testing
- It supports a number of queue depths
You can get this app from http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Benchmarks/ATTO-Disk-Benchmark.shtml
How to use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test hard drive speed on Windows?
- Download the hard drive speed tester install it
- Run the Benchmark.exe
- Select the drive and hit Start
- Wait for the test to complete then check the results
3. Anvil's Storage Utilities
Features of Anvil's hard drive speed test includes
- Performs complete read/write tests using random and sequential operations
- Provides a full set of results which include response time
- It comes with three IOPS tests
How to use Anvil's Storage Utilities to test hard drive speed?
- Download this hard drive speed tester and install it in your device. Simply go to http://as-ssd-benchmark.en.softonic.com/
- Unpack the app. It will detect and display the information related to the computer in its interface
- Check the settings to ensure that everything is configured correctly.
- Click start for the test to start.
4. RoadKil Speed test
Features of RoadKil hard drive speed test includes:
- Provides details on how fast your drive can transfer data
- Allows you to compare different drive speeds
How to use the software to test your hard drive speed?
The usage of this app is very straight forward.
- Download and install the app. To download, click http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=13
- Run the program and select the disk to be tested
- Hit begin test and wait for it to complete.
5. Parkdale
Features of Parkdale speed test for Windows hard drive includes:
- Measures speeds of hard disks, network servers and Cd Rom devices
- Transfers are measured in kb/s or MB/s
- Available for both Mac and Windows
- Has 3 different modes; FileAccess, QuickAccess and BlockAccess
To use this Speed tester to test hard drive speed, follow these simple steps:
- Download the app
- Run the up, select the drive and choose one of the three modes that you would like to use in order to speed test the hard drive.
- Click start and let the process run
6. CrystalDiskMark
This is a freeware utility that is used to check hard disk performance.
Some of its features to test hard drive speed are:
- Runs both sequential and random read/write tests
- It can test any drive. This means you can perform an external hard drive speed test.
To download this app, go to http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
Steps on how to use CrystalDiskMark to perform hard drive speed test
- Download CrystalDiskMark and then install it
- Run the program
Mac Hard Drive Test Software 2017
- Select the following setting in this step
- Number of runs 1
- Size to test 50 MB
- The disk you would like to check
- Click ALL to start the test.
Part 2. Video Tutorial on Hard Disk Speed Test
Part 2: Top 4 hard drive speed test software for Mac
1. BlackMagic Disk Speed Test
This is one of the best apps that you can use to perform hard drive speed test on Mac.
The features of the hard drive speed tester are:
- It has only one window
- Requires a few simple settings
- Compatible with OS X 10.10 Yosemite
- It shows write/read speeds in MB/second
Interested in this app? Well, go to http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/38019/blackmagic-disk-speed-test to download the app for your Mac.
How to use BlackMagic Disk Speed Test to speed test hard drive on Mac?
- It is just one simple step. Click the Start button and the app will write test your drive.
- To access files use the File and Stress menu to choose the right hard drive to be tested.
2. NovaBench
This is another popular speed test app for Mac that you can use for hard drive speed test on your mac.
Features
- Comes with 3D graphic speed tests
- Tests the floating point arithmetic speed of CPU
- Tests write speed of the selected or primary hard drive
To download this app, go to https://novabench.com/download.php
Here are the steps about how to do a hard drive speed test by using NovaBench
- Download NovaBench app into your Mac
- Start up the Program
- Close all other applications before you run the speed test.
- Run the Speed test process. Go to Tests>> Run All Tests
- When it is completed, you will receive something like this:
3. Parkdale
The features of this hard disk speed tester include:
- Transfers are measured in kb/s or MB/s
- Measures speeds of hard disks, network servers and Cd Rom devices
- Has 3 different modes; FileAccess, QuickAccess and BlockAccess
- It is available for both Mac and Windows
To use this Speed tester, follow these simple steps:
- Download the app from http://run.to/sz
- Run the up, select the drive, and choose one of the three modes that you would like to use in order to speed test the hard drive.
- Click start and let the process run
4. Geekbench
This is a hard disk speed test tool which has the following features;
- Benchmark: Measures Speed and performance
- It measures how your computer manages tasks and applications.
- It determines the stability of the computers system.
- It supports Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Hard drive speed test using Geekbench
Just follow these simple steps to perform hard drive read-write speed test using Geekbench. It can also do an external hard drive speed test.
- Download Geekbench into your device. You can get it from http://www.primatelabs.com/geekbench/
- Switch all the applications on the your computer to get maximum results.
- Launch the Geekbench application
- Click on Run benchmarks. If you are using a free trial version then you will be limited to 32-bit mode. If you purchase it then you can use 64-bit mode.
- Once the progress is complete you will see your results as in the figure below.
What's Wrong with Drive
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