DriveDx Reviews1.9.1

Well TJX, I'll give 5 stars for you. I agree with you that this is the "best, most excellent" drive utility I have used. And I also have tried them all. Far better than SmartUtility and SmartReporter. I especially wanted the ability to check external USB drives. Great for my purposes.

It saved my data when it flagged a drive was on its way out. I backed up my stuff and ordered in a new drive, and re-purposed my old drive as an external. Two months later it died.

App seems pretty... smart. ;) Support still on holidays?

Well TJX, I'll give 5 stars for you. I agree with you that this is the "best, most excellent" drive utility I have used. And I also have tried them all. Far better than SmartUtility and SmartReporter. I especially wanted the ability to check external USB drives. Great for my purposes.

If you want to know the status of any drive at any moment then you must have this app! It even has excellent test features built into it. This is one of the very 1st apps that can look at any SSD no matter the format and tell you what the drives status is. It is completely non-intrusive. Support is excellent. Recent updates make it even more excellent! Works great in Mojave!

This is a response to @frans-3 below who asked why one app can report 90% health, and another 85%, but also in general to anyone using utilities that interpret SMART data, and to be careful what conclusions you draw. SMART data is just raw data; the industry and drive makers have (purposefully) left open and undocumented, many of the attributes reported, so they are open to interpretation by both drive manufacturers, and by software like Drive X that interpret the data. Seagate may choose to report one attribute differently than how Western Digital chooses too, for example. The SMART specs are often vendor specific, although some over time have come to a general agreement about what it is reporting, but only as it relates to what raw data is reporting, NOT what it means in terms of predicting future health. Kind of like a car; 4 people may report that they hear a 'funny' noise when the engine runs, they all agree and report there is 'a noise'. They may disagree what it means or predicts, and then the reality might be the engine could fail tomorrow, or it's nothing, and the engine is fine, it's just a noise but does not effect performance. To make it even more ambiguous, the SMART spec was developed when hard drives were mechanical; it hasn't been updated by the industry since 2011. with SSDs,, even vendors disagree as to what certain attributes mean or are supposed to report when it comes to SSDs, where some of those attributes don't even make sense. For example, a 'bad sector' on a physical mechanical drive has a real physical location, that is fixed (platter 1, side 2, block 30, sector 5, etc). On a SSD, sectors can be relative, the SSD controller reallocates sectors and blocks all the time, a 'sector' number as the operating system thinks of a sector number, doesn't necessarily correlate to the same physical location on a memory chip at any given time, or over time. The concept of 'sectors' and 'blocks' is a hold over from mechanical drives, it is useful to continue to use such terms so that backward compatibility with old BIOS's, drive software and Operating systems is maintained, but 'under the hood', hidden from the operating system, it's not directly identical to how rotational drives managed such things. I'm not saying these diagnostics are not useful, but you have to take with a grain of salt, especially with SSDs, because it is all up to the drive maker's interpretation of WHAT to report and WHAT is BEING reported, and up to the software vendor of the diagnostic program, to interpret what the data means, and make predictions from it. Percentage 'health' reports and predictions, are at best generalized and open to interpretation, at worse, potentially misleading. In your example, you have to ask, what does '90%' actually mean, according to DriveDX? Does it mean, 10% of the sectors are bad? Does it mean out of 50 SMART attributes measured, 90% fell in a 'good' range, and 10% fell within a 'bad' range? Is each attribute weighed equally? (obviously some are probably more significant than others, are they given more weight?) Is it a probability, like 90% chance of rain tomorrow? Like 90% chance of failure? When? Tomorrow? A year from now? Over a length of time? What length of time? If it reports 90% today, and 85% a month from now, does it mean you run out and buy a new drive? If someone is using these drives in a mission critical environment (24/7, minimal down time) would he/she take the extreme and say anything less than 100% healthy is unacceptable? In reality, s/he would be replacing drives CONSTANTLY if they took that position, so it begs the question, so if not 100%, then when if at all? Replace at 90%? 85%? 75%? If your auto repair guy said your car was '90%' healthy, what would that mean? I think you see the point.

DriveDX give me a health for my iMac SSD (part of Fusiondrive) of 90%, SSD reporter however gives me a health of 81%! How can this be???

I am not so sure about the accuracy of DriveDX ( 1.4.2 ) hard drive checker ( one of many many hard drive checkers on the market these days ).

Yesterday it reported a potential failure with the main hard drive.

Today it reports all is good with that drive.

Strange ??

On the other hand this application has had not updates or improvements since December 2015.

I like DriveDx because it looks at more than just the usual SMART indicators to measure drive health, and in my case alerted me to a failing mechanical hard drive in my Mac Mini that another SMART utility reported was just fine (subsequent Googling verified that the indicators that DriveDx flagged are valid signs of a failing drive). What I don't like is that the settings for the free drive space alert won't stick. I tried to turn off the alert on my Time Machine volume, but it doesn't remember the setting and every time I plug in my Time Machine volume it tells me that it's running low. Once it even reported that my OS X Recovery partition was running low on free space! I had to disable the otherwise useful email alert feature because I was getting nothing but false alert emails. I wrote the dev about this and never heard back, which in combination with a last-updated date of December 2015 makes me wonder if DriveDx is still being actively supported.

This app has not yet been updated to protect against the Sparkle updater framework vulnerability that was discovered in Jan. 2016. Apps that use a vulnerable version of Sparkle and an unencrypted HTTP channel for server updates are at risk of being hijacked to transmit malicious code to end users.

The only version of DriveDX that works with Transcend SSD370(S) drive (with Silicon Motion controller) is DriveDX v1.4.0rc1 with included smartctl 6.3.1. Any later version of DriveDX (including final v1.4.0) freezes my Mac as soon as I start the app (If I boot from that drive, there is no way to stop the machine than forced shutdown). Also, this causes increase of "UDMA CRC Error Count" SMART value of the SSD (that has a treshold of 50). The problem seems to be in included smartctl utility, that since v6.3.2 fails to send some SMART command and makes the drive unusable. Developer accepted my reports, but no reply for a planned fix appeared since July 2015, so I'm stuck to DriveDX v1.4.0rc1. My advise is, before you start DriveDX, boot from your original Mac HDD and unmount any external drives (don't unplug them). Then start DriveDX and look in the Console app. If you see "IOSATDriver::sendSMARTCommand failed", then in no case start that version of DriveDX any longer (you can try an older version as v1.4.0rc1 instead). In this case, any failed attempt increases important SMART values of you external drives.

I've been using DriveDx for 2 years. Yesterday when I mounted a 1TB backup HDD via eSATA, DriveDx flagged Current Pending Sectors Count had jumped from 0 to 3. I chose an alternate HDD to complete my backup. Using Disk Utility I tried reformatting the suspect HDD using a 3-pass wipe. After 6 hours it barely made any progress and indicated more than a day to go. The drive was running hot at near 50°C so I clicked Skip and -- with obvious laboring -- DU completed a simple format and mounted the drive. DriveDx then quickly reported the Current Pending Sectors Count had increased to 13. Okay -- increasing bad sectors, hot drive, slow performance -- another HDD bites the dust (a 6 year old WD Black in case anyone is wondering). Prior to yesterday, this HDD was performing just fine and all health indicators had been green. The beauty here is that DriveDx caught the early sign of a bad drive BEFORE I committed it to another backup. Just an everyday example of how this application continues to prove its value to me.

Saved me from many problems as DriveDx reported problems with my SSD so I was able to replace it in time. Worth every penny!!!

Wonderful tool to get an extensive insight about your drive(s). Great UI giving loads of information. Only issue I have is with one drive the DriveDX's self-tests are 'Aborted by host' all the time. :-(

Great app, but strangely their website blocks incomming connections from some countries (404 error for any url)

This app does exactly what it says and does a great job too. It is great in every way I can think on what to expect in such an app, however the only thing I would comment on is that it could be better if it were half the price. $20 is a bit high in my opinion, but I did pay for it so I can't complain anymore than that. I don't have any regrets, but I just think for most users, this app would be more suited for half the price.

Looking for something to send alerts when drives/partitions are almost full. This product was suggested, but the demo doesn't seem to have any way to do that. I see how to email alerts when the drive is failing. But nothing for full. Am I missing something?

Perfect for monitoring internal AND most of external hard disks.

Great tool.

Use this at my job and absolutely love it. Must have for Techs and IT gurus.

A couple of days ago, DriveDx warned me (pre-failing) for one of my external drives. I don't use it any more for backup. After DriveDx warning, drive behaved abnormally, I heard loud clicking noises and I got warnings from OS X as the drive unmounted abnormally while it was not the case. Thanks to DriveDx.

If you value your music, photos, movies, or data – you need DriveDx. Don't think that this is just SMART. From my understanding it uses much more advanced metrics to assess drive performance over time, and the likelihood of impending failure, and can proactively send a warning email when those metrics deteriorate. DriveDx correctly predicted the premature failure of drive on a production iMac – which Apple promptly replaced – no questions asked. In fact, Apple was impressed with DriveDx as it uses many of the same metrics that their own proprietary diagnostic suite does. When you consider the cost of trying to recover data from a failed drive – the modest cost of Drive Dx is a bargain. Nothing else I've tested comes close. DriveDx isn't just SMART – it's brilliant.

As a photographer, I'm always concerned about drive failure because I know it will happen to all of my drives. What I don't know is when. DriveDx exposes low-level information of internal sensors, pre-fail indicators and lifetime accumulators of information that have allowed me to anticipate problems before they affect my system. As a result, I sent e drives back to LaCie for exchange under warranty due to anticipated drive failure. LaCie technicians don't use a tool of this sophistication! The developer is actively interested in making his product better and communication is rapid and excellent. This is one of the best investments you can make in your system. I recommend it highly.

Best in its class. Excellent tech support.