How to detect bad sectors of Mac drive and monitor its health

Why we need to check our Mac drive health status regularly? How to avoid bad sectors in your hard drive? These are some common questions that has been asked or searched by many Mac users. However, Mac machines are pretty good in performance and made of quality hardware and technology that makes it less prone to failure still it demands proper maintenance and care. 

We recommend backing up Mac hard drive in case of bad sectors. Helpful utility Mac hard drive backup.

 

So, we can say that Mac OS X is a pretty solid system, it just require your little attention and awareness towards its health and performance.  There are many things that one can perform to keep his Mac drive running without any trouble.

Things like: optimizing(speedup) Mac performance, partitioning drive, cloning(bootable backup) your Mac disk, checking Mac drive health status etc for maintaining your Mac completely. There are many applications available in market for performing the above mentioned tasks. But, here we will focus on about how to assess your Mac drive health. 

 

The first tool that helps in determining whether your Mac disk is encountering trouble or not is your Mac's own Disk Utility. But it can't fix failing things in your Mac drive. So, basically this inbuilt application checking your volume status if it shows error messages or warnings. 

 

As we know that no one can stop drive crash but can control by proper monitoring and maintenance. There are several reasons of Mac hard drive failure among them bad sectors is the prominent. So, here we will study about causes and types of bad sectors. 

 

Bad sectors is the area on drive which can't be read. Bad sectors can't be repaired but is is experienced that these can't be found in image of drive or volume having bad sectors. Hence, imaging doesn't consist bad sectors. 
 

There are two types of bad sectors – hard and soft

Hard bad sectors or Physical bad sectors:

Hard bad sectors are also called physically damaged sectors which occur due to head crash or in a fixed magnetic state during movement of platter. 

 

Cases when hard bad sectors creates:

1. If your hard disk is exposed to extreme heat while writing data.

2. When the head has comes in contact to the disk surface, a hard bad sector might be created. Please note that hard bad sectors can't be repaired, but they can be prevented.

Soft Bad sectors or Logical bad sectors:

Soft bad sectors are called as logical bad sectors which occurs due to logical errors. 

 

Cases when soft bad sectors creates:

1. If an Error Correction Code (ECC) found in the sector of hard drive that does not match the content of the sector.  
2. Hard drive formatting or logical errors is also a reason of creation of soft bad sectors. Unlike the hard bad sectors, soft bad sectors are repairable. These soft bad sectors can be repaired by overwriting the whole disk with zeros.

Detecting and fixing soft Bad sectors in windows:

If we take the Windows OS, then we find that there has been an inbuilt check disk tool, called "Chkdsk". During booting sometimes a message shown that it is recommended to run check disk for fixing errors. So, it is recommended to run this tool once in a month. It will scan and fix for hard disk logical errors, detect bad sectors, so that it will no longer affect window's hard disk. So, this way it keep away unstability of computer.

Alhough Check Disk takes about half an hour to perform its task. Time taken in check disk depends on many factors, like PC speed, amount of memory occupied on the disk, RAM and disk size. So, it is good to run Check Disk when you don’t need to use the computer for some time.

As we know bad sectors are the area on your hard disk that cannot be read. Not only that but they cause damage or unstability to your drive that may lead to a catastrophic failure. As we have already discussed the cases when they created so it is well known now that these are fairly common with normal computer use after a while. Besides the imperfections of the world we have some perfect tools that help us to detect and avoid hard drive failure due to these. Here I am talking about Mac drive Monitor application.

Now, lets talk about the tool for detecting and avoiding bad sectors in Mac drive.

Unlike 'check Disk' inbuilt tool of windows, Mac doesn't has any inbuilt tool available for detecting bad sectors and monitoring performance of your Mac drive.

But, in my recent search I have found one such tool name Stellar Drive Monitor for assess your Mac drive health.

Important: The above mentioned tool can not purchased as a single tool but it comes by buying “Drive tool box” -­-­-­- which itself a combo of 14 Mac optimization utilities(Drive Monitor is one of its 14 modules).

This tool does following tasks in few minutes:

• Scan your Mac drive for bad sectors
• Give detailed information about your Mac drive/volumes
• It shows performance reports of your Mac drive in order to make you aware and give chance to take any required action before emergency strikes.

This is recommended to take backup or clone of your Mac drive if you suspect that your drive may be failing anytime. Because, technically it is said that the more you use a failing drive or the drive having problem the more you decrease the chances of recovering data that’s stored on it. As this data is becoming completely inaccessible.