DiskFailure For Mac

Checking your disks periodically for reading and writing errors is highly advisable: this way you can identify potential issues before your drives fail completely. DiskFailure is a minimalist Mac OS X application designed to help you perform the test through an user friendly interface.

DiskFailure will place a small icon in your status bar and you must click on it to access the app’s main window. Here you can run diagnostics on your current device and view the results for all Macs connected to your iCloud account (iCloud must be enabled).

The top area displays a list with the detected devices and the test results, while on the bottom you can visualize the analyzed log files, the monitored parameters and relevant drive events.

The first time you perform the test, you must grant DiskFailure access to the Apple System Logs folder (where all the .asl files are stored). This way, DiskFailure can analyze the logs and display any issued alerts, Growl notifications, or possible errors.

Note that if your Mac is connected to your iCloud accounts, DiskFailure will store the details in the cloud, making the data available on all your machines.

Of course, you can refresh the analysis manually, but if you leave DiskFailure in your status bar, the app will perform a new analysis every 2 and a half minutes. The app is not using many resources (about 1% of CPU power and around 50 MB RAM on a 2GHz Intel Core 2 iMac with 6GB RAM), so it should not disrupt your workflow.

DiskFailure is proposing a streamlined and intuitive solution for checking your disk for errors periodically. Since the app does not require too many resources, you can have it running at all times and check it at certain intervals for possible error messages.