12/4/2021 Macos Check Hard Drive For Bad Sectors
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.
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.
Go to the properties page for the drive and use the tools found there to check the hard drive for errors. EDIT: By the way; if the drive is so far gone that the spare sectors have been exhausted, the drive may not be too long for this world anyway. I would think that the life it had left was rather limited. Mar 16, 2020 For example, my drive above has a few bad and reallocated sectors, and I haven't run into any issues—probably because those bad sectors weren't housing any actual data at the time.
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
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:
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 driveCheck Hard Drive Space
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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Apple is held in high regard for a number of things: branding, design, innovation and security. All these apply to their entire line of products. What cannot be denied, however, is that there is no device that runs flawlessly.
Even Apple’s high-end computers—the desktop workstation Mac Pro and the laptop MacBook Pro—can still run into problems that plague every hard drive-based computer. This article aims to help in the repair of one specific problem: bad sectors.
What are bad sectors?
These are parts of the hard drive that cannot be read or written on for new data. The data stored in those sectors either vanished or got corrupted.
Bad sectors also contribute to major slowdown of the computer even in simple processes. They can spread if they are still used, eventually destroying the entire hard disk.
What are the causes of this problem?
Hard drives are fragile pieces of equipment. It cannot take much impact or stand in high temperatures without getting damaged. When the disk inside the drive touches the head due to shock, it can lead to problems. Power outages that occur during data writing can also be a cause. Bad sectors caused by physical damage are called hard bad sectors, and they cannot be repaired.
Another cause of bad sector is the parity bits that got corrupted by malware, resulting in the data not matching when the hard drive is trying to read them. This is called a soft bad sector and fortunately, it can be repaired.
What can be done?
Mac users can rest easy with the help of these five professional programs that can repair soft bad sectors, and help make their Macs run smoother than before.
1. Disk Tools Pro
This all-in-one software can defrag the Mac’s hard drive once it starts slowing down due to excessive use. It alerts the user if a drive is in imminent danger of failing, and it creates a backup of entire volumes for worst case scenarios. They also repair bad sectors, among many other things.
What makes this software convenient is its ability to schedule any of the abovementioned activities without having to boot the damaged volumes with a CD.
Price – $79.99
Developer – Macware
2. SpeedTools Utilities Pro
Detecting bad sectors and repairing them is easy with this compact and affordable software program. It can analyse how much of the hard disk is being used, which files are taking too much space, how much stress the Mac can take, and much more.
The easy-to-navigate interface has everything Mac users need to fix their hard drives. Users can also run multiple processes in different volumes to maximize the time used in Mac repair.
Price – $29.95
Developer – Intech Software Corporation
3. TechTool Pro 6
Recover files that have been lost due to corruption or unintentional deletion, create an emergency partition without using a physical DVD, and repair bad sectors even in solid-state drives.
The TechTool Protection feature gives users access to processes that the Mac runs on its own, giving them control on which data to backup in case of drive failure, how much space there is left in the drive, and which files have been deleted.
Price – $99.99
Developer – Micromat
4. AlsoftDiskWarrior
Alsoft boasts of unparalleled data recovery with their patent-pending technology in DiskWarrior. Instead of rewriting recovered data on an old directory in a step-by-step process, an entirely new and flawless directory is created with all the lost files.
It can also automatically scan for any hardware issues to keep users up to date with the condition of their hard drives. If an issue is found, it will notify users so that they can back up their files before it is too late.
Price – $99.95
Developer – Alsoft
5. Drive Genius 3
Trusted by Apple’s very own tech support, “Genius Bar”, Drive Genius promises accessible and powerful drive utility tasks to fix and optimize Macs. This latest version is a 64-bit app, making it faster in all of its processes such as defragmentation, sector editing and data shredding.
The new DrivePulse feature checks the physical and digital status of the hard drives, while the Enhanced Repartition can resize partitions without having to delete them. Its Scan feature can detect bad sectors, let the hard drive “know” where that bad sector is, and move data onto a different sector.
Price – $99
Developer – Prosoft Engineering
Running into bad sectors on a Mac can be a frustrating experience especially when considering the stability of such computers, but it does not mean the end of their usefulness. Purchasing any of the aforementioned software can solve that seemingly irreparable problem, and they can even find a way to make the Macs faster and more secure.
Check Hard Drive Mac
Of course, it would be less expensive to simply keep the Mac from getting these problems in the first place. Here are a few tips:
![]() Check Hard Drive Xp
Check Hard Drive Windows 10
Author Bio: Jay Manangan is a part time writer and marketing consultant for Repair Labs. An industry-recognized specialist in Laptops, HD camcorder, Gaming Consoles, LG, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, iPhone and iPad accessories as well as iPad and Iphone Repair.
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