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?
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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.
Jun 22, 2020 Tests write speed of the selected or primary hard drive. To download this app, go to 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. Apr 06, 2011 Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. To use HFS Explorer, connect your Mac-formatted drive to your PC and go to File Load File System From Device. The software will automatically locate and load the connected drive for you. You’ll then begin seeing the contents of the HFS+ drive in a new graphical window. To copy any folders of file, select them and click the Extract button. Simply download and open the app, select your target drive if your Mac has more than one hard drive (this is done by clicking the gear cog) and click start to begin the benchmark. For improved. Aug 04, 2019 How to Test Hard Drive Speed on a Mac? To test your HDD, you’re going to need a third-party program, since this functionality isn’t built into macOS. Two of the most popular are BlackMagic and NovaBench, so we’ll show you how to use both. For context, most modern hard drives have read speeds averaging 120 Mbps and write at 128 Mbps.
Best Apps to Check Your Mac Hard Drive Health
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.
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:
- 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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Macs aren’t immune from hard disk corruption and failures. They’re just as common on Macs as they are PCs. Although most Macs have solid-state drives, even these systems can have problems. Apple’s built-in utilities and some third-party programs will get you up and running.
Symptoms of a Hard Disk Problem
The worst noise you’ll hear from a mechanical hard disk is a clicking or grinding noise. That means the drive is failing. At that point, the drive isn’t repairable. It’s time to back up your data and then replace the drive. You already have a backup though, right?
![Test Test](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126202464/640829410.jpg)
Not all drives exhibit symptoms in this way. Sometimes you’ll get the prohibitory no symbol at startup or a flashing folder with a question mark. After turning off your Mac and turning it back on, the system boots just fine. Other times you’ll get the spinning rainbow wheel, letting you know your Mac is waiting on something. That could be because your Mac is waiting on the hard drive.no symbol at startup or a flashing folder with a question mark. After turning off your Mac and turning it back on, the system boots just fine. Other times you’ll get the spinning rainbow wheel, letting you know your Mac is waiting on something. That could be because your Mac is waiting on the hard drive.
Diagnosing the Problem
If you suspect your hard disk is failing, it is time to make a backup. Now. Again, you should already have a backup of your Mac. Don’t proceed before you try to make a backup. Apple’s Disk Utilityis the first place to start. Reboot your Mac and hold down the command and r key down at the same time to enter Recovery Mode.
Mac Hard Drive Test Appointment
Don’t have recovery mode? You’ll need an offline Mac installer to run Disk Utility off a USB drive.When you reboot, you’ll see the OS X Utilities window. At the bottom of the list is Disk Utility. Select Disk First Aid to test the hard drive for problems. The utility will fix any problems or warn you of a S.M.A.R.T hard drive error. If Disk Utility finds any problems, try rebooting and see if everything is working.
Some Macs have a built-in hardware diagnostic. Reboot your Mac holding down the D key. That runs a full hardware test on your Mac. The diagnostic will report any problems, including the hard drive.
Mac Hard Drive Test Software
Does your Mac Support Apple Diagnostics? Apple explains which models support this here.Your Might Have a Confused Hard Drive
The Mac’s journaled file system usually keeps things in order. Glitches and improper shutdowns might leave things scrambled. If Disk Utility reports a problem it can’t fix, it is time to try a third party utility. My favorite is Disk Warrior. It often fixes problems Apple’s utility can’t. It can also do more diagnostics on your drive.
Unlock Mac Hard Drive
You’ll need to boot your Mac off a Disk Warrior flash drive to do testing and repair. The program creates a Recovery flash drive. During its diagnostic process it will repair and optimize the drive. If it detects a hard drive error, the program warns you.
Sometimes it isn’t the Hard Disk
If you’ve tried all this and are still having problems, there could be something wrong with your Mac other than the hard drive. If you have a MacBook Pro, the ribbon cable that connects the hard drive to the rest of the computer can go bad. The Mac exhibits all the same symptoms as a failed hard drive. The best way to figure this out is to remove your hard drive and try it in another Mac. If the hard drive works on another computer, then it isn’t your hard drive.
Check to see if the repair is free: Check your serial number with Apple. Your Mac may still be under warranty.The other typical problem is operating system errors. A system update or upgrade was interrupted leaving your Mac in a confused state. You can reinstall your operating system from the recovery mode. That won’t erase any data on your Mac.
Rarely the problem is in the Mac’s System Management Controller (SMC) . Before you give up hope, try Apple’s procedure for resetting the SMC.
What if You Have a Solid State Drive?
Solid State Drives (SSDs) don’t make the typical noises of a mechanical hard drive. After all,they have no moving parts. The testing procedures are the same. You won’t be able to easily remove the hard drive to test it in another machine. Programs like Disk Warrior are smart enough to change the optimization procedure for an SSD drive.
Replacing the Hard Drive
Some Macs have easy hard drives to replace. Some Mac models hard drives aren’t replaceable by end users. Most Mac-savvy retailers know the difference and can guide you towards the right repair. Replacing your hard drive with an SSD will give you the best performance, but may limit your storage space. We cover the differences here.
ALSO READ:DaisyDisk: The Best, Most Intuitive App to Find Large Files on Your Mac’s Hard Drive
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