Hello Stephen, My comments in Situ below.
> On 27 Dec 2016, at 6:50 pm, Stephen Chape <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi folks. > > Does anyone know if it is really worth buying third party disk utility these > days ? > EG: Disk Warrior or Tech Tool for example. If you are running El Capitan or Sierra, My short answer is “No, its not worth buying third-party Disk Utilities these days” I've always had Disk Warrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and other third-party utilities installed on my earlier Macs and used them quite frequently. But I don’t even have these utilities installed on my current Macs since probably Yosemite OS X 10.10 - my current Macs are running Sierra 10.12.2 (I still have the above utilities installed on my Support Drive). > > Or can most things be covered by Mac Disk Utility ? “Apple has made ongoing hardware and software improvements that keep disks running happily more of the time. OS X performs certain disk maintenance tasks automatically in the background—for example, it defragments smaller files on the fly, keeping all their segments contiguous on a hard disk so they’ll load faster. (Solid-state drives don’t require such defragging.) And, when you perform a Safe Boot (starting your Mac with the Shift key held down), OS X runs a more extensive set of diagnostic and repair procedures without you doing anything else. These and other improvements to OS X have reduced frequency of disk errors. In addition, Disk Utility has gained a number of new features in recent years, and it can now repair faults that might once have been out of its reach.” If you look over the feature lists of the major disk utilities, you will find that they all advertise capabilities that Disk Utility already offers for free. The three third-party programs can check a drive’s SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) status, repair disk permissions, and repair at least some types of volume corruption. Drive Genius and TechTool Pro can create a bootable duplicate of your disk and securely erase free space, and Drive Genius can also initialize and format drives. But Disk Utility does all that, too. Disk repair always requires you to start up from a separate volume. But as long as your Mac is running at least Lion or new OS X , you don’t need a second drive; simply restart while holding Command-R to use OS X Recovery, which boots your Mac from a hidden partition (or, in some cases, over the Internet) so you can run Disk Utility. The third-party utilities, by contrast, ship on bootable DVDs—except that they can’t boot the newest Mac models (not even if you use an external SuperDrive, for Mac models that lack an internal one). So in order to repair your startup disk, you’ll need to create a separate boot volume with the disk utility installed. (TechTool Pro’s eDrive is the sole exception here, behaving much like OS X’s Recovery HD.) > I get the occasional slow down and more rarely freeze at start up and want to > run some checks. Try Safe Mode: Some problems can be solved with Safe Mode. Restart your Mac. As soon as you hear the startup chime, press and hold the Shift key until you see the grey Apple logo. The startup process may take a while; once it’s done the words “Safe Boot” should appear in red in the login screen menu bar. Log in and you’ll see a progress bar as Sierra runs diagnostics and clean-up processes. (It also disables software that loads at startup and login.) If the problem goes away, restart again normally. The problem is most likely due to third-party software that was disabled in Safe Mode. Look for updates in the App Store. If the problems persist Boot into Recovery Partition: 1. Restart your Mac - Hold down ⌘-R until the gray Apple logo appears; 2. Locate & open Disk Utility - in Recovery, you can simply select it in the list that appears and click Continue. 3. In the list on the left , select your startup volume. Note that volume names are indented underneath the names of the physical devices on which they reside. 4. Click Repair Disk Disk Utility examines your disk and attempts to repair it if necessary. When it’s finished, you can quit Disk Utility and restart your Mac normally. Cheers, Ronni 13-inch MacBook Air (April 2014) 1.7GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost to 3.3GHz 8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM 512GB PCIe-based Flash Storage macOS Sierra 10.12.2 > > Regards, > Stephen Chape >
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