Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

Yes, that would be a good example, because some of them are quite capable of lasting years. I had a CDROM player that lasted almost 15 years and it was used often. Just because the optics on R/W units fail doesn't mean others aren't worth testing.

Give it up guys. Optical drives are basically a thing of the past. There isn't any software that will do a thorough job testing them for consumers, and no one is going to develop software for something that's not going to be in any systems in two years.

They may be a thing of the past but they're still used. I have a bunch of DVD-RW, with a "-" deliberately, that I recorded 10 years ago. They get pretty frequent use and they all are readable. Not one single one of them has failed.

ThomasB2010 wrote:

They may be a thing of the past but they're still used. I have a bunch of DVD-RW, with a "-" deliberately, that I recorded 10 years ago. They get pretty frequent use and they all are readable. Not one single one of them has failed.

I would say you've had extraordinary luck. Were those burned on a Mac, PC, or an actual recorder.

I have yet to see one of these slim line optical drives last more than a year.

About 10 years ago there was a wave of DVD video recorders put on the market by virtually every manufacturer. Within 3 years nearly every single one of them had been pulled off the market because the lenses were burning out. Companies that were typically getting 4 and 5 star ratings were getting 1's. You must have done your burning with one of these. May I be so bold as to guess....did it even last 3 years?

Maybe your DVD player/burner/whatever put out some good DVDs but that's probably all it did. I'm going to assume it's dead. You can get an USB flash drive to store information on and not have the problems you do with optical drives.

As I said before, pursuing this path is somewhat pointless.

The point isn't whether or not they're obsolete the point is how do you test one, especially for mechanical problems. Has it occurred to you that someone like me with old and usable optical media may still like to keep the media usable? If it stick it into a failing optical drive will the drive's heads scrape across the surface of the media ruining it. I think the question is worth asking.

The only place you may find testing products for optical drives to do the type of testing you seem interested in is probably from the manufacturer. Don't be terribly surprised if the utilities are DOS-only.

CaptH wrote:

About 10 years ago there was a wave of DVD video recorders put on the market by virtually every manufacturer. Within 3 years nearly every single one of them had been pulled off the market because the lenses were burning out. Companies that were typically getting 4 and 5 star ratings were getting 1's. You must have done your burning with one of these. May I be so bold as to guess....did it even last 3 years?

Maybe your DVD player/burner/whatever put out some good DVDs but that's probably all it did. I'm going to assume it's dead. You can get an USB flash drive to store information on and not have the problems you do with optical drives.

As I said before, pursuing this path is somewhat pointless.

I think you mean lasers, not lenses. In any case I remember that because I was considering buying one. Every single brand was getting 1 star ratings from companies that normally get 4 or 5 out of 5.

Java developer is right. Check with manufacturers. Odds are too, they'll be DOS applications, and probably MS-DOS at that (not full blown Windows).

CaptH wrote:

I think you mean lasers, not lenses...

Correction: That should have read "I think I meant to say lasers, not lenses…"

Proof that it pays to read before posting, which I obviously didn't do. 😊

Well, there are some:

1. Opti Drive Control (Windows)

2. InfinaDyne CD/DVD Diagnotics (Windows)

3. CDRoller (Windows)

I would have provided links, but they're all Windows so why bother. Other searches are yielding forums with results similar to this one with comments ranging from "why bother, they're cheap, just replace the drive" to "why bother at all with optical."

One of those packages above can theoretically recover data from a bad optical. That would be a nice feature to have. To the best of my knowledge nothing like it exists on Macs.

Data recovery from a bad optical drive would be an asset to anyone considering how many of them go bad so easily. No such thing for Mac's to the best of my knowledge.

You could try this for optical drive recovery:

http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-software/cd-dvd-recovery-mac.php

Read the fine print about the "free" download because it states it's only a demo version. I'm not familiar with their stuff. I took a look at their store and it looks like they're porting that product to every platform on Earth (Sco Open Server? Seriously?) with prices that range from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars.

So……if you're really interested in pursuing this "optical drive testing" topic to the ends of the Earth, and I'm not, there ya go!!

They have a long list of products, and some of the information is confusing. In the Mac Section they have a "Mac Data Recovery" product that claims it can restore deleted files.

Is this possible with an SSD? I know that on an HDD the drive can delete a block by simply leaving the contents in place and then marking the data as available, so it's there. On an SSD the block has to be completely wiped and most SSD, I believe, do this during their cleanup operations. Depending on the SSD that wouldn't give someone much time to recover data I would think.

I think that with SSDs you're going to find that a lot of the tools and options in old products like TechTool Pro and Drive Genius won't work that well on SSDs. I'm not familiar with Stellar Phoenix at all so I couldn't comment. I also doubt, however, that hard drives are going to disappear from the market any time soon simply because of the cost of SSDs. It's just too cheap to not use a hard drive for backups, and if you keep decent backups, you won't need to worry about recovery anyway.

Just make sure the backup drive doesn't crash!😁

MrJavaDeveloper wrote:

….I also doubt, however, that hard drives are going to disappear from the market any time soon simply because of the cost of SSDs. It's just too cheap to not use a hard drive for backups, and if you keep decent backups, you won't need to worry about recovery anyway.

Just make sure the backup drive doesn't crash!😁

I can buy a backup hard drive with terabytes of storage for tens of dollars, and SSDs of comparable size would be probably pushing thousands of dollars, and certainly hundreds of dollars. I'm still a little paranoid about SSDs. They just haven't been around long enough in my opinion.