Feature alerts you to corruption or damage on drives
I have more storage on my Mac than most people. In addition to my 1GB internal SSD (my startup disk), I have four external USB 3 drives.
Having more drives than most means having more drive-related headaches as well.
Many occur when a file or files on the hard or solid-state drive become corrupted. When they’re data files from applications, it’s usually no big deal. The offending file(s) can usually be deleted and then replaced from a backup.
But it’s not as simple when the damaged files are the invisible files your hard or solid-state drive uses to maintain its indexes and directories. You may not see any evidence that there’s a problem until your Mac won’t boot or it freezes every time you try to open a particular document or application.
If the problem was on your startup disk, the usual advice in years past was to restart your Mac while holding down the Command + R keys to start using the built-in macOS Recovery feature. Click Disk Utility, then select the recalcitrant disk from the list on the left and click the First Aid button.
That works fine today, but if you’re running macOS 10.12 Sierra, you can skip the reboot. Your version of Disk Utility (in Applications/ Utilities) is able to fix startup disks without rebooting. I warn you that your Mac will be virtually unusable while First Aid is running, but it usually works and is faster than rebooting twice.
Here’s the bigger problem: You’ll receive no warning if file corruption occurs. Disk Utility can diagnose and repair many disk-related issues, but you have to launch it and click several times for that to happen.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a utility that monitored your hard and solidstate drives for potential data corruption and alert you of possible physical and logical issues before they become serious problems?
I’ve tried a bunch of them over the years, and the only one I trust is Drive Genius 5, a $99 utility from Prosoft Engineering (prosofteng.com).
Its killer feature, called DrivePulse, has alerted me to corruption or damage several times already this year.
DrivePulse is its best feature, but Drive Genius does much more, as I’ll explain next week.