Chris Milligan wrote:
Do I need to have and use all of these?
As others have said, you don't really need anything besides Disk Utility for routine disk-related chores. For example, all utilities that repair permissions use the same "back end" repair routines built into the OS, so it doesn't matter if you use Disk Utility or say Onyx to do that -- they both do exactly the same thing & there is no reason to use more than one of them in succession for that repair. Onyx & several other multifunction utilities also use the same 'verify disk' routine built into the OS that Disk Utility uses, often included for convenience or safety.
The expensive, 'heavy duty' disk utility apps like Disk Warrior or Drive Genius can do disk related tasks that Disk Utility can't, but most users get along fine without them. For instance, the OS does some file optimization on the fly & includes features that make significant file fragmentation less likely to begin with. Together with the speed & sophisticated buffering schemes of modern hard drives, this often makes the file optimization features of these utilities of little practical value, since it frequently takes more time to optimize the drive than you would save by doing that. Also, Apple adds new capabilities like on-the-fly partition resizing to new releases of Disk Utility from time to time, so you may no longer need one of these other utilities for such things. For many users, the money spent on these utilities probably would better be spent on an extra hard drive.
All that said, some of these utilities can be very useful to have around, especially the multifunction ones, but not to perform routine maintenance. That's because there is no routine maintenance needed to keep Macs happy. If you need to use any of these utilities regularly for that (including Disk Utility), something is wrong that needs to be identified & corrected so it won't cause the recurring problems that make regularly using these utilities necessary.
