Didn’t want to start a new thread but the most recent that mentions Diskwarrior had its last comment in January 2021.
Surprised no-one has commented that almost 2 years after the M1 chip was introduced, Diskwarrior still does not work with it. Disappointing. No comment on the website as to when an updated version will be available. And now we have the M2 chip…
What are people using for disk repair/maintenance now?
My only experience is that recently my Synology reported errors on a newish 6TB drive, and it was not able to repair it. Upon removing it from the array and mounting it independently, Disk Utility initialised it and its basic testing features couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Not wanting to simply trust it and risk problems down the track, and looking for a second opinion, I found DriveDX, ran it in trial mode, it immediately confirmed the bad sectors, so I could be sure that I had to dispose of the drive (disappointingly out of warranty about a year).
My limited experience shows that once a drive is reporting problems there is no software that can resurect it reliably.
I have a couple of drives, that reported bad sectors within SMART, while used with a Synology.
Beside one, that hat obviously a Headcrash, and was replaced, I managed to recover all of this drives by using DiskUtility (after I connected them to my Mac). 6 of them doing still fine.
You can use the “Delete”-Function (all Data will be deleted from the Disk!!) with the Setting of enhanced security (the button on the lower left of the Pop-Up) with 3 runs.
This will overwrite all data, and isolate faulty sectors, so you can use the disk again in a lot of cases.
There are limitations with Techtool Pro and APFS drives due to Apple’s limited documentation provided thus far.
… while the Volume Rebuild can repair many drives with volume structures problems, a full rebuild that reorganizes the volume structures can only be implemented once Apple provides further documentation.
It is important to note as well that Techtool Pro uses a low-level API to test, repair, rebuild, and defragment Mac OS Extended volumes. No such API yet exists for APFS, and it is unclear if Apple will make one available. More info here APFS support status - Micromat
Back in the late 1980’s when disk drives seemed to have many bad sectors yet were also very expensive, it was very popular (on MS/DOS systems) to use the program SpinRite to “repair” drives. It works at the hardware level so is independent of drive format. But frankly this was a move of desperation as it became more sensible to just toss the drive rather than risk another failure on an iffy drive. But it’s still available. GRC | Hard drive data recovery software
Although the approach of updating the drive’s own bad sector table and relocating data where possible was sound. But you’re right, every disk drive I was responsible for was a desperate situation when it began to to fail. 