Volume Repair Utilities — Food for Thought - 12/20/14 06:07 PM
NOTE: It is almost guaranteed Murphy's Law will bite me after I post this.
Ira L's post and recent email correspondence with a friend got me to thinking about volume repair utilities. Other than acting as a beta tester for one of the developers, I have not actually needed a volume repair utility on any of the seven hard drives around here or on any of the many Macs I support for friends and family in a long time. Neither do I recall anyone on this or other forums in real need of one of these utilities. I don't count those who run volume repair prophylactically as I used to, I am thinking of cases of actual volume damage that Disk Utility cannot handle. There have been a couple of failures but those were drive hardware failures and not repairable by any software. (I do use Micromat's Checkmate to continually monitor the health of my drives, both HDD and SSD components, and hopefully provide advance warning of impending drive failure but that is it.) I have attributed this greatly increased stability to improvements in OS X's volume management but that is purely supposition on my part.
Additionally, since I got a Mac mini with a Fusion drive (I am busily upgrading my older Mac minis to Fusion drives as well — I really like the cost/performance ratio of the Fusion drive) I do not run any defragmentation or optimization because…
and
I have, on occasion run the various memory and system tests in DG and TTP and they can be useful, but the main benefit I get from these is TTP reports all of the S.M.A.R.T. values and not just the summary reported by DU, DG, and various other utilities.
Out of old habits more than anything else, I do have the latest versions of Drive Genius and TechTool Pro but my experience is making it really difficult to justify the cost of upgrading those utilities. So what say the denizens of FineTunedMac? Is it worth keeping Diskwarrior, Drive Genius, or TechTool Pro up to date or is it feasible to rely on Disk Utility and Time Machine?
Ira L's post and recent email correspondence with a friend got me to thinking about volume repair utilities. Other than acting as a beta tester for one of the developers, I have not actually needed a volume repair utility on any of the seven hard drives around here or on any of the many Macs I support for friends and family in a long time. Neither do I recall anyone on this or other forums in real need of one of these utilities. I don't count those who run volume repair prophylactically as I used to, I am thinking of cases of actual volume damage that Disk Utility cannot handle. There have been a couple of failures but those were drive hardware failures and not repairable by any software. (I do use Micromat's Checkmate to continually monitor the health of my drives, both HDD and SSD components, and hopefully provide advance warning of impending drive failure but that is it.) I have attributed this greatly increased stability to improvements in OS X's volume management but that is purely supposition on my part.
Additionally, since I got a Mac mini with a Fusion drive (I am busily upgrading my older Mac minis to Fusion drives as well — I really like the cost/performance ratio of the Fusion drive) I do not run any defragmentation or optimization because…
Originally Posted By: Prosoft Engineering
Fusion Drives cannot be defragmented as it is a software RAID.
Originally Posted By: Micromat
Also, optimization is not needed with Fusion drives. Optimizing Fusion drive data works against the data organization performed by the Fusion drive, and can shorten the life of the Solid State Drive component.
I have, on occasion run the various memory and system tests in DG and TTP and they can be useful, but the main benefit I get from these is TTP reports all of the S.M.A.R.T. values and not just the summary reported by DU, DG, and various other utilities.
Out of old habits more than anything else, I do have the latest versions of Drive Genius and TechTool Pro but my experience is making it really difficult to justify the cost of upgrading those utilities. So what say the denizens of FineTunedMac? Is it worth keeping Diskwarrior, Drive Genius, or TechTool Pro up to date or is it feasible to rely on Disk Utility and Time Machine?