Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

Fan control programs can generally only set a higher Base speed for fans. From there, they will coninue to speed up based on measured temperatures.

If you could actually turn the fans down, you risk destroying your expensive Mac due to excess heat.

There's another one out there that has a name and maybe diagram of a lizard or a gecko for its logo. It's supposed to be be good. A friend of mine use it on his iMac when he put in an SSD.

A list of links to fan control stuff, for those interested:

http://exirion.net/ssdfanctrl/

http://www.hddfancontrol.com/

http://www.eidac.de/

As far as I'm concerned anyone using one of these is doing so at their own risk. I'm sure there are others out there...just make sure they work

I'm reasonably certain the fan control programs that people are typically using in their systems are monitoring internal temperature sensors. It would make no sense to do otherwise.

I haven't seen anyone complain about their 2009 iMac after installing a fan control application.

What I'm not sure about is whether or not the applcation was written just to adjust this particular issue or whether they're really intended to allow a user to control/turn on/off fans at will. If it's the latter I can see Grant's point.

It seems to me that no one ever addressed the idea of testing optical drive units. Since many of you were in the "hard drive" thread and we (at least me, anyway) learned that many of the problems with optical drives were actually related to poor quality media, it got me to thinking about testing.

Other than reading and writing to good media, I don't think there would be another way to test optical drives for the following reasons:

1. If a failure is detected, is it the media or is it the optical drive heads or mechanics causing the problem.
2. You surely can't do a surface scan on unitialized media. You'd get nothing but errors.

A hard drive lives in its own little private world, but an optical drive is having media installed and removed, with some of it of varying quality and variable cleanliness.

I would have to assume the best test regimin would be to create a good quality optical test CD/DVD and use it as a read source for tests, and then for drives with write capability, actually burn one using good media. Cross reference the test results with a known good CD/DVD and verify the results.

If anyone else has any ideas, please feel free to chime in or correct me.

I'm reasonably convinced that you can get reliable optical media, but the laser on the actual drive and it's short life, IMHO, still make it more or less to unreliable to be taken seriously. What are you supposed to do? Have a tally sheet sitting next to a computer informing you of how many hours the optical drive has spent writing data and then just replace it?

I think I'm going to have to say that testing optical drives shouldnlt even be a consideration, just assume they're bad and if they're not, they soon will be.

I would have to agree with the life of the lasers being rather short in life, but why do the lives of the ultra thin optical drives seem to last even shorter? Is it just that they can't take the impact, since they're typically in laptops and banged around alot, but I had a Mac Mini years ago and the DVD+/-RW didn't even last more than maybe 20 or 30 writes, and that's certainly not thousands of hours.

If you've ever pulled one out of a unit, the slim types are housed in fairly thin layers of metal, whereas the full sized units are typically on rigid frames. It amazes me the slim types even work at all.

Why bother with optical drives at all? I know from a few threads that in some cases, given decent media is used, optical media can be reliable, but they aren't even available on most Apple systems now, you can do redundant backups with hard drives, and you can transfer your critical stuff to iCloud or whatever other online service you want to use to keep them safe.

I would surely think that most online backup companies have enough brains to not lose your data, but if you trust yourself to perform archaic and time consuming backups using optical drives, then you're responsible if that data gets corrupted, lost, damaged, or whatever. Try telling that to the IRS, guys!

The tail end of this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5414482?answerId=25802819022#25802819022

goes into the why's and why-not's of optical media. If you get archive quality media they can apparently be pretty good at storing old stuff.

I've got about 10-20GB or old source code that just been getting bounced from machine to machine as I upgrade, change drives, or move to a newer system. I don't want to keep track of this stuff and I don't want it eating up hard drive space any longer. Optical if done right sounds like a good solution.

The whole issue is confusing. I'm apprehensive about optical media but for long term use, what else is there? Has anyone anywhere ever seen a hard drive last over 10 years? I'd like to know the answer to that question.

There is no good answer to your question.

The Library of Congress in the US wrestled with that question a while ago, and decided the best universal archive medium was ...

... paper.

....why am I not surprised by that???? 😁