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?
When you have prepared a backup, shut down the Mac and then press and hold Option (Alt), Command, and R while starting the computer. Keep holding the keys until the Apple logo or spinning Globe appears. From the macOS Utilities window, select Disk Utility. 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).
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.
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. Check out how to clone mac hard drive.
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
Mac Hard Drive Speed Test
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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How to check your Mac's hard drive health status?
Internal storage is one of the most important components of any computer. This where the operating system and all software resides. Therefore, any crashes on the hard disk (HDD) or flash drive (SSD) might lead to a Mac failure or, even worse, data loss. Periodically checking the health status of the hard drive is a good precaution against any data loss or unexpected software crashes. Note that hard disks and especially flash drives often have a limited number of write cycles. Whether internal or external storage, drives are susceptible to failures over time.
Before data loss or problems accessing the Mac, you should be able to detect the warning signs of drive failures: random freezes, freezes when attempting to move files, errors stating that permissions are denied when attempting to access files or data (which previously were accessed regularly without problems). There might also be a number of other random or erratic issues relating to hard drive failure. Fortunately, Apple has included a built-in tool that is able to check and repair minor damage to storage. This method works on both internal and external storage (hard disk drive or flash drive). Furthermore, you can repair the startup disk by using the file system check function. In this article, we describe the methods available to check drive health status and attempt to repair bad sectors and other issues.
Table of Contents:
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Check hard drive health via Disk Utility
As mentioned above, do not wait until you encounter erratic issues before checking the current status of the hard drive. To prevent any data loss or performance problems, periodically inspect the drive. This is quite simple using a built-in tool relating to the hard drive called Disk Utility. Use Spotlight by pressing the keyboard shortcut of Command and Spacebar, and then type Disk Utility. Alternatively, go to the Utilities folder under Application via Finder. Once you have launched the application, select one of connected drives from the list in the left hand sidebar. Click the First Aid button in the top middle of the window. You will be prompted to confirm your action. Click Run.
If you are trying to check the status of a startup disk, another warning will pop up, stating that you are trying to verify a booted drive. To perform a complete check, the operating system will be frozen. If you are not performing any important, active tasks, click Run. All software will regain its full functionality immediately the verification process finishes.
When the First Aid function completes, the resultant message will state that the hard drive is OK. Otherwise, click Repair disk (if suggested) or try repeating the First Aid procedure until the result indicates that the hard drive is OK. Disk Utility is sometimes unable to repair a booted drive - in this case, follow the next method.
Repair startup disk via macOS Recovery mode
Disk Speed Test For Mac
If you have encountered a situation whereby Disk Utility is unable to repair the hard drive when it is booted, there is another way to access the tool without loading the Mac. You are advised to first create a backup of the storage - the easiest way to do this is by using Time Machine. When you have prepared a backup, shut down the Mac and then press and hold Option (Alt), Command, and R while starting the computer. Keep holding the keys until the Apple logo or spinning Globe appears. From the macOS Utilities window, select Disk Utility.
Repeat the procedure to check the hard drive - select one of the connected drives from the list in the left hand sidebar. Next, click the First Aid button in the top middle of the window. You will be prompted to confirm your action. Click Run. Finally, click Repair disk if prompted and attempt to automatically repair the hard drive. Checking hard drive health status is good prevention against unexpected issues and data loss, however, also maintain regular backups, since hard drive failures can sometimes occur without any warning signs.
Use Single User Mode to repair hard drive
The most efficient method might be to boot the Mac into Single User Mode and use the fsck command - a shortcut to launch the file system check feature. First, create a backup and then shut down your computer. To access this mode, press and hold Command and S immediately after hearing the startup chime. In Single User Mode, you should see a lot of white text on a black display. Be patient, since this boot might take some time. Once booting is finished, each new line will be prepended with 'localhost//'. Type the following command and press Return to execute:
- fsck -fy
When the checking process is finished, look for a message stating 'The volume appears to be OK' in the results. Otherwise, repeat the system check until you receive this message. Finally, type reboot and press Return to exit Single User Mode. When the computer is completely booted, launch disk check via Disk Utility again to ensure everything is working properly. If none of these steps resolved the hard drive issues, contact Apple Store or a licensed technician.