a review by Tom Piper
The core of your computer’s long-term memory is its hard drive . . . how well do you take care of it? Whether your internal boot drive, or one of your external backups (you do have backups, right?), regular and dependable attention is important to their ongoing health (and effective recovery, should their health fail). This is an expansion on the presentation I recently made at our user group meeting.
MICROMAT has a long tradition of outstanding products, with its flagship TechTool Pro 6 setting the standard of excellence in hard drive support. Their motto “Designed for the Novice, Yet Powered for the Professional” epitomizes an effective approach with a very powerful utility.
As their website (www.micromat.com) says, “Using TechTool Pro, you don't need to be an expert. With an easy-to-use interface, single-click diagnostics scan critical CPU, memory, video hardware and more to identify impending problems to help you prevent costly repairs. New in version 6, TechTool Pro ships standard in a 3 user Family Pack, yet provides a comprehensive suite of tests that also delivers for the Mac professional.” The three principal functions include:
- Drive Repair and Data Recovery which repair damaged volumes, identify files in bad blocks, recover deleted files, clone exact duplicates of drives for backup, and create an emergency startup partition without requiring a physical boot DVD, exclusively via eDrive.
- Testing, Maintenance and Optimization using SMART test drives (including internal ATA, SATA or SSD's) to identify potential problems before a potential crash, prevent file access conflicts, monitor LAN activity, services and device availability, and optimize to help speed up your Mac.
- Single-click Diagnostics through easy-to-use, one-click diagnostics that scan critical CPU, memory, video hardware and more to identify aberrant behavior, providing ongoing protection to help you mitigate issues and prevent costly repairs.
In recently working on a damaged hard drive for a client, I created an emergency startup partition on the active system volume using TechTool Pro's eDrive, without ever having to boot from the DVD. I performed a SMART test on an internal SATA drive to detect changes in reliability, and was able to repair corrupt (damaged) HFS+ volume -- this also works on newer solid-state devices (SSD's). I could have used TechTool Pro's Volume Cloning to create exact duplicates of my volumes for trouble-free archiving (a good idea for all of your drives). Plus, TechTool Pro helps me recover deleted files and lost data when needed. If bad blocks are found when scanning my hard drive, I can identify and restore the corrupted files within them from previous backups I have archived.
To help keep my Mac running at peak performance, I use TechTool Pro to optimize my volumes after defragmenting files, and even use it to repair disk permissions which may prevent problems accessing applications or files on my Mac. In addition, TechTool Pro also helps with device management within my local area network (LAN). To monitor the configuration or security of my LAN, it displays Bonjour-supported devices and active services, and helps track devices no longer available to the monitored network. As if that’s not enough, TechTool Pro provides continuous protection by monitoring my system, alerting me when aberrant behavior is detected, and helps me maintain top performance for my Mac every day. This is one solid utility that is very dependable.
A new boxed version of TechTool Pro 6 is available for $99.99 (also downloadable as a 57MB application, or a 1.8GB Boot DVD), or an upgrade from previous TechTool Pro, TechTool Deluxe and AppleCare users is $39.99. A Business Pack (10 users) can be purchased for $299.99. The Lion Update is also coming soon, as well as an updated TechTool Protogo. Minimum system requirements are:
- PowerPC G4 867MHz processor or newer,
- Mac OS X 10.4.9 or greater, including Snow Leopard,
- Mac OS X 10.5 or greater for eDrive creation on active startup volume,
- DVD-ROM drive, and
- 512 Megabytes RAM or higher.
I can’t imagine my utility toolbox without TechTool Pro as one of my primary tools. You should consider this as a valuable investment in the maintenance of your hard drives and solid state drives.
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