Hi there,
I own about 10 to 15 older (+/- 10 years) HDDs. Halfs of these HDDs I use these for specific backups, and the other half for mirroring the first part (via Carbon Copy Cloner) / backups of the backups.
I check the quality of the HDDs from time to time, using the Apple application Disk Utility. But I wonder is there another app which might be better? E.g. the SMART status of the HDDs is not available in the Disk Utility.
Thank you,
Claus
PS: Yes, the quality of HDDs might be not that good anymore after so many years. I should replace these sooner or later (before it is too late) but I can not afford it at the moment.
Perhaps DriveDx?
…
edit: come on MPU. I am trying to post this but it keeps saying minimum 20 chars. Very frustrating.
1 Like
I tried DriveDx but it crashed after a few clicks.
Last update is from 2023 (Release notes). On the other side they say the newest version of DriveDx works with MacOS 26.
If you have access to a PC where you can mount the drives, there is no tool I trust more than SpinRite from Steve Gibson.
He’s been maintaining this software since 1988, a tiny executable written in Assembler.
Intel only though.
EDIT: SpinRite works on a low level of drives, and is agnostic to operating system or data on them.
1 Like
If you’re comfortable in the terminal you can check the SMART status with smartctl -a /dev/diskX. This is installable via the smartmontools package in homebrew, macports etc. You can then trigger the drive to run a self-test with smartctl -t long /dev/diskX; some time later that result will be available to you.
For intensive one-off checks of disks if you have a bunch sitting around, I would run badblocks e.g. badblocks -wsv -b 4096 /dev/diskX. Note that this is destructive, so you would need to move the data off the drive first and be extra careful that you are selecting the right disk to run this on.