
If anything is amiss, DiskWarrior will notify the user via an on-screen or e-mail alert, or it will launch an AppleScript to take a more-complex action such as logging an event in a database. You can schedule DiskWarrior’s SMART query to run hourly, daily, or weekly it will run even when DiskWarrior isn’t running. Since DiskWarrior can’t fix hardware-related errors, SMART support is a welcome and useful addition.

A lot of errors can be an early warning of the impending demise of a drive’s hardware.
Diskwarrior mac software#
SMART-savvy software can ask the drive whether everything is OK. Most mainstream - not just server-grade - IDE drives sold over the last few years support SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). SMART and VigilantĭiskWarrior 3.0 can now query a hard drive as to whether its hardware is hale and hearty. DiskWarrior 3.0 is leaps and bounds faster when rebuilding a directory on a drive with healthy hardware, but it also takes its time and doesn’t give up when confronted with hardware errors. DiskWarrior took well over an hour to work its way through the damaged disk, but it did finish, and the newly generated directory allowed us to recover files from the drive. One test disk developed bad sectors in the area occupied by the directory data, a fate that usually spells disaster. In our testing, DiskWarrior 3.0 readily found and fixed mild directory problems such as improperly set custom icon bits and incorrect volume bitmaps, and it even handled more-severe hardware-related problems with aplomb. DiskWarrior 2 supported journaled volumes but had the unfortunate side-effect of disabling journaling after it had finished rebuilding the directory. DiskWarrior 3.0 is significantly faster than its ancestor, and it supports HFS, HFS+, and journaled HFS+ volumes. But version 3.0 eliminates both of these hurdles. Even worse, because OS X volumes typically have many more folders and files - most of them invisible to the casual user - DiskWarrior 2.1.1 could be excruciatingly slow. The converse is true in one situation: sometimes, a volume’s directory is so damaged that DiskWarrior has to build a new directory by piecing together a coherent whole from digital remains, so it may recover files, or their fragments, that have been previously deleted.ĭiskWarrior 2.1.1, version 3.0’s immediate predecessor, was compatible with OS X–formatted drives, but it didn’t run natively in OS X.
