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Kool Tools: DriveDx for Mac OS X

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BinaryFruit’s DriveDx http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx) is a useful Mac OS X solution for SSD and HDD health diagnostics and monitoring.

It measures the overall health of both SSD and HDD drives. This allows users to take action to avert the failure, and save themselves from resulting data loss and downtime.

Unlike some drive health diagnostics utilities that simply check built-in S.M.A.R.T. status, DriveDx performs overall drive health diagnostics using drive health indicators (like SSD wear out/endurance, reallocated bad sectors, offline bad sectors, pending sectors, I/O errors, and more) that most closely correlate with drive failures according to the statistics reported in the latest researches focused on identifying drive failure trends.

This gives a user a comprehensive picture of a current drive health status and enables foreseeing potential problems with drive failure and loss of sensitive data. What’s more, DriveDx shows this information on a user-friendly Mac-style interface in an easy-to-understand format.

The software is a combined drive health analysis and forecasting tool. It monitors and analyzes changes to S.M.A.R.T. attributes in order to continuously evaluate drive health status and predict drive failures. In addition to “Failed” and “OK” drive statutes DriveDx supports “Warning” and “Failing” statuses indicating that a drive is in a pre-failure status and backup of sensitive data is highly recommended.

DriveDx performs both SSD and HDD health diagnostics. Moreover, it uses a separate set of indicators for SSD and HDD to monitor drive health status. This is important as a SSD works differently from a HDD, and requires a different algorithm to check its health status. Also, SDDs typically are more dependent on firmware than HDDs, and DriveDx has been programmed to support many versions of firmware (please see our website for a complete list of supported firmware).

DriveDx lets you configure the delivery of customized drive status and free space reports by e-mail so doesn’t require a user’s presence to inform about drive status changes. In addition DriveDx can launch built-in drive diagnostics self-tests.

The latest version (1.4) supports the “dark mode” of Mac OS X Yosemite. The user can now turn off the S.M.A.R.T attribute (health indictor) raw value alert and more.

The software requires Mac OS X 10.6.8 or newer. DriveDx 1.4.0 has four types of licenses that are currently being offered on promotion: personal license – US$19.99; family license – $39.99; business license – starting from $99.99; and IT-Consultant License, starting from $49.99.

DriveDx can be purchased from the BinaryFruit website or through the Mac App Store (a personal license only). A fully functional, 10-day trial version is available for download at the BinaryFruit website.

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