Maintenance Part 1: Protect your hard drive

IBASICS
Maintenance Part 1: Protect your hard drive

Michel Munger
LOW END MAC

In order to squeeze as many years of use as possible out of a Mac and to keep it zippy, you need to do some basic maintenance. In this three-part tutorial, we will cover some hardware and software maintenance, and this first piece is about the hard disk drive.

Your drive is the most important to maintain because your data resides on it, and is the one where potential human intervention is the most extensive.

Here is a brutal reality: your hard drive has mechanical parts that will fail one day. You should not ask yourself if it will fail, but when. There are two cases of data loss that you can prevent. Number one: your disk gets confused by damaged directory structures. Number two: your disk’s life has been shortened by abusive wear and tear, and it crashes.

Protecting your directory

The first step is maintaining the directory structures, and it is the easiest one because unlike a crash, directory damage can be fixed. Basically, your directory keeps track of all your files, from the system to your tiniest JPEG or Word document. If the directory is “broken”, your hard disk doesn’t know where the files are, and can overwrite or damage them.

Directory damage is sly. It comes in without knocking and it doesn’t let you know about its presence. In fact, data loss can happen several weeks or several months after directory damage, which makes directory protection a mandatory preventive maintenance task.

To avoid data loss, you first have to start with the right formatting and journaling. This feature, available under Panther and Tiger, monitors your disk’s activity and keeps it in a log. Should your Mac shut down unexpectedly or should you go through disk problems, recovery will be faster and repairs will be easier.

If your disk is already formatted, start up your Mac from the Mac OS X Installation CD – hold down the C key at startup - and use the Disk Utility to turn journaling on. TechTool Pro 4 and Cocktail, in example, can also handle it. If you are reformatting your disk, choose “Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)” before going ahead.

On top of journaling, I add another recommendation when formatting: splitting your drive in system and data partitions. Partition 1 should be used for nothing but the Mac OS X system and applications, and Partition 2 for your documents. Why? With that kind of setup, should the system partition run into serious trouble, you can still access your documents partition to salvage data in case you didn’t have a full backup.

Ideally, this kind of split should be done with two hard drives – a “system” drive and a “file deposit” drive - but I recommend partitions if you are on a budget.

Disk utilities

Journaling isn’t everything. You still have to do preventive maintenance to detect potential directory damage before it is too late. Firstly, you should know that Apple’s basic Disk Utility can do a fine job unless it runs into severe damage. To use it, start up your Mac with your Mac OS X Installation CD and launch the Disk Utility. Then, choose a disk, click on First Aid and click on Repair Disk. Running this test every two weeks or once a month is a smart idea.

If Disk Utility reports damage that it cannot repair, you have to decide whether you want to back everything up and reformat your drive, or if you prefer using a utility to fix it. Most people like to use a utility. Several of them are available, but which one should you adopt between DiskWarrior, Techtool Pro and Norton SystemWorks?

The answer is tricky because each of them has strengths and weaknesses.

Alsoft DiskWarrior is the pound-for-pound champion. It draws a graph of your disk directory to let you know if it needs to be rebuilt. If you rebuild the directory, a task that takes a bit of time on a system disk, all potential damage disappears because DiskWarrior discards the old directory and replaces it with a new one.

If you have DiskWarrior handy, just start up your Mac from the DiskWarrior CD. Click on the Directory button, then click on Graph to see the graphic and click on Rebuild to go ahead with directory rebuilding. Doing this once a month or every other month should be enough.

TechTool Pro 4 works differently because it separates the job into parts. Under its Tests panel, TechTool can scan and rebuild volumes structures (this takes a long time to do). It can optimize the directory separately, with the feature called Maintenance, found under the Performance panel. TechTool Pro 4 does some nice work, but personally, I have had some trouble with its slow execution, and it sometimes damaged my directories. On the other hand, it comes with an amazing set of hardware tests, which we will talk about in a future column.

Where does Norton SystemWorks stand? I know, it has a bad reputation, in part because Symantec is not a good Mac developer, but there are reasons to like it.

Norton, with its Disk Doctor component, tries to “patch” your disk directory instead of rebuilding it from A to Z. Therefore, Norton is the fastest utility for preventive maintenance. The big drawback is that patching is not easy, it is not always a permanent solution and it even exposes your directory to additional errors. This is why, in part, Norton caused trouble when “fixing” some people’s disks.

Don’t demonize it, however, because apart from speed, it has another major strength. Do you remember the old days, when you used Mac OS 9, and saw a flashing question mark at startup? Your Mac was unable to mount your disk, even if any utility was able to “see” it.

This can also happen under Mac OS X, with the difference that when starting up, you get a “Please restart your computer” screen, a UNIX crash known as a kernel panic. Believe it or not, Norton Disk Doctor is the best tool when this happens. It fixes a series of major errors and mounts your drive. Just when things looked hopeless, Norton saved your butt…

The final verdict on utilities? If money is not a concern, buy all three because each of them has different strengths. If you have to stick with just one, DiskWarrior is my recommendation. And if you cannot mount your disks correctly, Norton is probably less expensive than bringing your Mac to a technician…

Minimize the workload

As I stated above, a hard disk drive can crash because of wear and tear. To prevent this, you have to minimize your disk’s workload. The first way to achieve that? Know when to put your Mac to sleep and when to shut it down. The jury is still out on this one, mostly because there are many credible theories about the amount of wear and tear caused by different user habits.

Here are the main points:

• Every time you start up your Mac, the cold hard disk receives an electrical charge and works very hard to get your Mac ready for use. This puts a lot of stress on a drive.
• If you leave your Mac on at all times, your disk remains hot and it keeps spinning, wearing it out slowly.
• If you put the computer to sleep or put the disk to sleep, every wake-up process will put some stress on the drive.

Therefore, there is no perfect solution. Apple recommends to shut a computer down it you do plan to use it for 8 hours or more. Otherwise, you may put it to sleep or leave it on. Personally, I have been observing this advice and it always served me well.

Optimize your files

Another method to reduce your disk’s amount of work is to defragment your files and optimize your data. When your files are fragmented and in a mess, your hard drive has to work harder to read and write them. Imagine that all your tools are scattered in your house. Putting them all together in a basement room, for example, will spare you a lot of time and efforts when picking many of them up at the same time. The difference, with a hard drive, is that the additional wear and tear actually makes it crash earlier than it should.

What can you do about it? Optimize your data’s location on the disk. I know two tools that do this well: Norton Speed Disk (part of Norton SystemWorks) and TechTool Pro 4’s Optimization feature. Both will analyze your files and rewrite them to make file access a lesser pain. Your system will also run faster as a result.

There is no consensus about file optimization because the operation is demanding for a hard drive. Therefore, it is crucial to take a good look at the graphics produced by the optimization tool before going ahead with the whole process. Defragment and optimize your disk only when fragmentation is severe. For most users, this will be necessary two or three times a year.

Verify your S.M.A.R.T. status

Are you smart? Actually, what I mean to ask is whether your disk passes the S.M.A.R.T. test. The Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology can allow the smallest piece of software to take a quick look at your drive and let you know when it is about to fail. When you get a warning, it means that your drive may soon crash. It is nice to know it beforehand.

My product recommendation is free and it is called SMARTReporter. Once installed, it checks your disk at startup and displays a small icon in the Finder’s menu bar. The green disk means that everything is OK, and the red disk means… well, I’ll let you guess.

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Related links

Computer Equipment: Turning It Off Versus Leaving It On
Alsoft DiskWarrior
TechTool Pro 4
Norton SystemWorks
SMARTReporter (free)