Tags: disk-tool, disk-health, disk-temperature, monitor-harddisk, repair-disk Pros & Cons: Resident monitoring, alarm for temp and health, shows temp for each drive in system tray, S.M.A.R.T. And general info about internal/external hard drives, settings to adjust AAM /APM. Hard disk drive and SSD health inspection tool. GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl. It allows you to inspect the hard disk and solid-state drive SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it. Powerful external hard disk health checker on Mac? Ask Question. NONE of the operating system tools will do scans for bad sectors on a hard drive. You need third party tools to do that. Rather than provide a list re-hashing the merits of each I'd ask readers to refer to the list in the following link. Browse other questions tagged mac.
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My MacBook Pro (described below) fell 5 feet while it was powered on. Would the sudden motion sensor be able to turn off the hard drives in time? Also, can anyone recommend the best (free) hard drive diagnostic tools Mac OS X?
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Thanks, Chirag
hairboat♦4 Answers
I assume you are aware of the Shareware tools (Like the five mentioned in this article).
In any case, since you want the free option, you will have to rely in your common sense and the tools you have (this is also true for the Shareware options, which really don’t seem to add much at this stage). Most of the benefit of TechTool Pro and DiskWarrior is to have am emergency plan in place in case of hard drive failure. But that is to be done before the problem :)
Back to your case, I suggest you give Onyx a try to check the status of your HDD’s Smart status. Assuming you don’t hear strange noises in the drive, performing a full Clone to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner would provide you with an important piece of information: the computer can read your entire drive, block by block.
Both Onyx and OS X can verify your volume so I suggest you also perform a verify (using Disk Utility for example) and verify your permissions.
Finally, use AppleJack to execute some of the above tests to make sure that the OS is in Single User.
If after performing all of the above, you see nothing “out of the ordinary”, you don’t hear “strange click noises” or you don’t detect any strange slowness in your drive, you can assume that the drive has not suffered any damage.
But, all things said, I’d keep my backups up2date just in case. (You do have backups, don’t you?)
I’ve had drives fall from a desktop to the floor and survive for years without any problems, and some drives tipped 0.5 inches and instantly died. Hard drives are like unicorns. :)
oa-
About the only 'free' tool that's worth anything is smartmontools, IMHO.
smartmontools is a free SMART monitoring application that comes from the Unix, BSD, and Linux world (OS X is based on BSD). This tool can provide extensive SMART monitoring but it's command line which a lot of people don't like. Everything else costs money - I suppose some people have actual costs, like food, water, heat, mortgage, etc. etc.
ZVH, over on MacRumors, has written a list of drive testing tools but beware most of these cost money:
Mac hard drive test software - creating the definitive list
- Disk Utility, diskutil (FREE, comes with OS)
- Smartmon Tools (FREE, Open Source)
- SMARTReporter ($4.95 for commercial version, but an older version is FREE)
- Scannerz Lite ($21.95)
- Scannerz with Phoenix and FSE-Lite ($39.95)
- Disk Tools Pro ($79.99)
- Disk Warrior ($99.00)
- Drive Genius ($99.00)
- TechTool Pro ($99.99)
That's actually a really good report. Interesting that nearly no one commented on it. In any case, I think you get what you pay for. Tools like Disk Warrior and Scannerz are known to do very limited things but do an extraordinarily good job of doing it, while other 'Swiss Army Knife' tools apparently do a decent job, but not really all that thorough. The author only identifies a few applications as 'free.'
Although I find SMART status useful, I wouldn't base my life around SMART reports and would recommend that people do web searches about the reliability of SMART testing before using it as a defacto standard.
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Graham Miln
If you haven't already, you should pop open Disk Utility, select your drive, and click the Info button. Ensure that the SMART status is 'Verified'.
Of course if you hear any audible clicking or anything of the sort, then you'll likely want to order a new HDD now (then again, I figure you haven't heard any clicking, and are wanting to check the health of the drive to ensure it is okay).
Sounds like your best recourse would be to pull the hard drive and test it in a Windows Machine, or dual-boot Windows on your Mac. Software that's actually useful, like Seatools, which does far more than Smart Monitoring, and is far better than the sub-standard disk utility built into Mac.
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The convenience of external hard drives is undeniable. They allow us to carry terabytes of data everywhere we go, they can be easily shared among many devices, and their installation could hardly be any simpler. Because of their ubiquitous nature, we have come to rely on them so much that we seldom consider just how fragile external hard drives are.
How many people know how to recover files from external hard drives and how many would simply panic, not knowing what to do? If you know how to recover data from external hard drives, you have much better chances to prevent the worst from happening and turn what could be a disastrous situation around.
The goal of this article is to explain common hard drive issues and the different ways how they can be solved with the help of external hard drive recovery software tools.
Before You Perform External Hard Drive Data Recovery
Before you go online and download the first data recovery tool you come across, pause for a minute and let us explain some of the most common causes of hard drive failure to help you successfully solve the underlying issue.
By using a wrong hard drive recovery tool, you could make your problem worse and lose any chance to recover your data. But before we get to the most common causes of a hard drive failure, we first need to touch upon how hard drives work.
How Do Hard Drives Work?
Inside every external hard drive is an assortment of sensitive components that record data as a magnetic pattern formed by groups of magnetized metal grains. These grains cover circular platters that spin at 7,200 rpm, at least on consumer drives. Each platter has its own reading head, which hovers several nanometers above the platter’s surface, writing converting strings of bits onto the disk using electrical current fed through an electromagnet.
Attached to the bottom of the hard drive is a circuit board, which houses the main controller chip as well as many other electronic components that control the operation of the headers. One of these electronic components is a small memory chip that stores the firmware, which is permanent software that provides the necessary instructions for how the hard drive communicates with the other computer hardware.
Diagnosing Common Types of Hard Drive Failure
Hard drive failures can be categorized into two broad categories: software failures and hardware failures.
#1 Software Data Loss
Software data loss is most commonly caused by badly written software applications or unfortunate user errors. During the Windows XP era, there were many computer viruses designed to inflict as much damage as possible by deleting the data stored on hard drives.
Fortunately, this type of malware, short for malicious software, is much less common today, but software programmers still make many of the same mistakes as they did several years ago. The same, of course, also applies to computer users. Every day, important files are lost because someone decided to empty the Recycle Bin without first checking whether it doesn’t contain something important.
The one thing that most cases of software data loss have in common is recoverability. There are many capable tools that you can use to recover external hard drives after a software data loss without any expert knowledge. In the next chapter, we recommend our top 5 favorite tools for recovering external hard drives.
#2 Hard Drive Isn’t Spinning
This often happens after a sudden voltage spike. Inside the hard drive are special diodes that act as fuses. A voltage spike may cause these diodes to blow, making the hard drive seem as if it were dead and all data were lost. Usually, it’s enough to replace the printed circuit board (PCB), which can be done in a normal environment without opening the hard drive enclosure.
#3 Clicking or Beeping Noises
Clicking sounds are often an indication of a serious hard drive damage. They occur when a hard drive is unable to return the rear/write head to its home position. The head may be stuck on a platter, scratching it violently as the disk controller attempts to move it. A scratched platter usually means an irreversible data loss.
A hard drive may make beeping sounds when it’s trying to spin the platters, but it’s unable to do so. This can happen because of something that’s known as stiction. Because the gap between the hard drive heads and platters is so small, they can literally stick to each other. A hard drive recovery service center with a well-equipped, dust-free lab should be able to solve this problem, for a hefty price.
#4 Hard Drive Inaccessible
When your computer recognizes your hard drive, but you’re unable to access the files stored on it or boot into the operating system, it often means that the file system has been damaged. The damage can be extremely localized, perhaps affecting only the boot sector, or it can be widespread. The good news is that data recovery tools such as Disk Drill can easily recover data from inaccessible hard drives and help you spot growing file corruption before it gets out of hand.
#5 Hard Drive Not Detected
When your computer is unable to detect a hard drive which you know is otherwise in a good working order, it could mean that the hard drive is not compatible with your motherboard. This shouldn’t happen when dealing with regular desktop hard drives connected to regular desktop computers, but it can happen when dealing with exotic server equipment or older hardware.
5 Best Tools to Recover Files from External Hard Drives
External hard drive data recovery is easy when you know what the best data recovery tools are. Based on our experience, user reviews, and features, we’ve selected top 5 best tools for recovering external hard drives.
1. Disk Drill
Disk Drill is the most versatile, most user-friendly, and most feature-complete data recovery solution on the market, which is why it’s at the very top of our list.
If you have Disk Drill, you don’t really need any other software tool to recover data from your external hard drive. You can download Disk Drill for free from its website and instantly test just how quickly and effortlessly it can recover your lost files.
Disk Drill for Mac includes helpful hard drive management utilities that cover everything from data backup to hard drive health monitoring. Even though Disk Drill is the tool of choice for many IT professionals, it still manages to be just as accessible and easy to use as data recovery tools aimed at complete beginners.
2. TestDisk
This open source data recovery software can help you recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again. TestDisk runs under DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, and macOS. The tool is part of many popular system rescue CDs such as CAINE, GParted LiveCD, and Parted Magic. TestDisk runs in the command line, which is why we can’t recommend it to casual computer users. That said, if you are comfortable with the command line environment, TestDisk is a fantastic, lightweight alternative to graphical external hard drive recovery tools.
3. Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery can recover deleted data from Internal and external hard drives, help you retrieve lost data from inaccessible partitions, and do all of this in just a few minutes and with 1 GB of lost or deleted data for free. The software supports most file formats and storage devices, and it has already been downloaded by over 2 million customers. Unlike Disk Drill, which runs on Windows and macOS, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery runs only on Windows, as the name suggests.
4. PhotoRec
Multimedia file formats, such as JPG, PNG, AVI, or MP3, represent a majority of data computer users store on their hard drives. Understandably, it’s much easier to accept the loss of a PowerPoint presentation than the pictures from the graduation ceremony of your only child. PhotoRec is an open source data recovery utility designed to recover pictures, videos, and other common file formats from hard drives, memory cards, and digital cameras. It recognizes over 480 file extensions from about 300 file families and runs under DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Sun Solaris, and macOS. Just like TestDisk, PhotoRec is a command line utility with no graphical interface.
5. R-Studio
R-Studio is a family of data recovery tools designed to solve just about any data recovery scenario. R-Studio can recover data from all major file systems, perform raw file search, fix startup issues, perform data recovery over LAN, and much more. Its intended audience are technicians and network experts tasked with recovering data from corporate networks and business computers.