DRIVEDX FOR YOUR MAC: A REVIEW

Would you like to monitor your drives and be warned ahead of time of possible drive failure? Then you need to add DriveDX to your utility library. DriveDx is a nifty utility tool for monitoring your drives. It diagnoses your drive and shows you if it's in a good condition or at risk.

One of the problems faced by computer users is the inherent need to believe that our Macs are in good shape and that our storage devices, hard drives, or SSDsare working as they should. The fact is, sooner or later, storage devices will fail.

 Sometimes, it may fail suddenly, that's why you should back up your drives from time to time. Or better still, have DriveDX installed, so you get to know about your drive failure ahead of time. 

In actuality, sudden drive failures are rare; if you monitor overall drive performance, you could probably predict that a drive is about to fail.

Pros

·        Goes well beyond just reporting the S.M.A.R.T status of a drive.

·        It provides both an overall health rating and ratings for parameters that point to failures.

·        Can run in the background to periodically collect information about drives.

·        Alerts you if issues are found.

·        Can perform active tests on hard drives and SSDs.

·        Can detect conditions that lead to failure, even though S.M.A.R.T may not show issues.

·        SSD lifetime left indicator.

·        It provides temperature, power cycling, and power-on time information.

·        Includes detailed information about each parameter being reported on.

Cons

·        Automatic self-tests are often aborted by the host computer.

·        Little control over when self-tests or parameter checking is performed.

Using DriveDx

DriveDX installs as an app that you can run at any time; you can also set the app to start automatically whenever your Mac starts up. You can set a time interval, from testing every 10 minutes to testing every 24 hours (and other options in-between); you can even turn the testing off. 

But if you do select the auto-run option, you run the risk of having a test being run when you're performing some storage and CPU-intensive task, such as video or audio editing, where unfettered access to your storage system is a requirement.

In future versions of DriveDx, a setting that can suspend testing if your Mac is actively being used, or prevent a test from starting unless certain idle conditions are present, would be a nice improvement.

DriveDX Features

·        The Interface

DriveDX uses a simple window-plus-sidebar layout, providing a well-designed, the single-window interface that is easy to use. The sidebar lists the drives attached to your Mac, along with three categories (Health Indicators, Error Logs and Self-test) for each drive.

Selecting a drive from the list will cause DriveDx to present an overview of the drive's health and performance in the main area of the window. This includes a quick look at S.M.A.R.T status, overall DriveDx health rating, and an overall performance rating.

 If all three display in green, that's a quick indication of your drive being in tip-top shape. As the display color moves from green to yellow, you can begin to worry about how long the drive is going to continue to work.

Along with the overview, DriveDx provides general information about the selected drive, as well as a problem summary, health indicators, temperature information, and drive capabilities.

Selecting the Health Indicator category from the sidebar provides a more detailed view of how well the selected drive is performing.

Selecting the Error Logs category will display a log of any errors encountered while performing the self-tests.

And finally, the Self-test category is where you can manually run two different types of self-tests on the selected drive, as well as see the results from previous self-tests that have been run.

·        DriveDx Menu Bar Icon

In addition to the app's standard interface, DriveDx also installs a menu bar item that gives you a quick overview of all of your drives. This lets you close the main app window, while still having access to the basic information about your drives.