Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

Stellar Phoenix has been around for years, but it's known primarily as a Windows tool. It looks like they're making the same thing and converting it for use to a lot of other operating systems.

After searching a while it seems to me that the only way to test an optical drive would be to install a bootcamp partition on the system, boot Windows, and get some tools for Windows. Testing optical drives is obviously not something done on Mac's much.

ThomasB2010 wrote:

After searching a while it seems to me that the only way to test an optical drive would be to install a bootcamp partition on the system, boot Windows, and get some tools for Windows. Testing optical drives is obviously not something done on Mac's much.

Installing a bootcamp partition to run something like a manufacturers optical drive testing software may not work. The software likely needs direct access to the hardware and the controllers on the optical drive, and running through bootcamp may disallow this. I don't know that for a fact, but it's something to be aware of as a possibility.

Considering that Apple isn't selling ODs on most of their units any longer, I doubt you'll see anyone developing anything to test them. Why would they?

I question that comment on a bootcamp based Windows not being able to access hardware properly. If that was the case a lot of games that make low level calls to video hardware wouldn't work, but they do. The only way to probably know for sure is to find someone that's done it or just try it yourself.

Another thing: A Mac can be made into a completely Windows based machine, so if worse came to worse it could be installed on another drive and booted from that natively.

ThomasB2010 wrote:

...Another thing: A Mac can be made into a completely Windows based machine, so if worse came to worse it could be installed on another drive and booted from that natively.

That doesn't sound too time consuming now, does it? 😁

You wouldn't catch me using Windoze in a thousand years. Also, I thought they still used MBR and the boot 0 drive, the one that's in the system and seen as the first drive needs to have the Windows boot stuff. That can't be done on an external disk to the best of my knowledge, so that means you need to open the system up and replace the drive. That's a lot of work just to run an optical disk diagnostic.

I'm no Windoze expert and I'm not going to be, so if there are other ways to deal with Windoze in a Mac, forgive me for not knowing, or for that matter, not caring about it.

From the boot camp install doc located at:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1583/en_US/boot_camp_install-setup_ 10.7.pdf

is the following quote:

That's from the 10.7 version of bootcamp. I'm assuming it hasn't changed. Sounds like a lot of work to me!

There's really no need to get snarky about it. The fact is I have some old recordings on DVD and CD that are somewhat rare and hard to come by. I simply don't want them destroyed. I also have a Mac Pro, the type that opens up, and switching the drives around or installing one isn't that big a deal.

Well, have fun then! 😁

Sincerely,

Mr. Snarky

You seem to be focusing mostly on the mechanical parts of the optical drive when the optical parts are those that fail and are problematic. When was the last time you saw an optical drive fail because of a positioning error? It rarely happens. The optics burn out long before that can even happen. If I was interested in pursuing testing optical drives, what I would want to examine is how good is the data being read and more importantly, written to media, and this assumes your using good media, not some of the junk so commonly associated with optical drives.

There are too many variables associated with the optical drive itself, throw in a bunch of media with variable quality ranges as extreme as nice sunny day to raging hurricane, and the waters just get muddied even more. I really just can't see testing an optical unit properly, except under some type of laboratory conditions.

There are too many variables associated with the optical drive itself, throw in a bunch of media with variable quality ranges as extreme as nice sunny day to raging hurricane, and the waters just get muddied even more. I really just can't see testing an optical unit properly, except under some type of laboratory conditions.

Here, Here!!

I can see testing SSDs and HDDs but optics are a waste of time. I know there are archive quality optical media that are good, maybe even excellent, but the whole market seems to have been over run with such shoddy media and now maybe even drives, can it be trusted? If someone could provide me some type of link to a burner that's guaranteed to at least be reliable for a certain number of hours or writes or whatever, then it might be worth looking at, but these drives are now being sold in stores for less that $20 so how good are they?

I might add, I don't think it was any accident that some manufacturers are completely phasing optical drives out of their product lines.

I've noticed there isn't a whole lot of mention about SMART in this thread. Is it really that unreliable?

SMART provides a lot of false positives (everything is fine). By the time it sounds the alarm, your drive is usually dead.

SMART technology is about as good as a thermometer is for detecting illness. WIth a thermometer, if you have a fever, it indicates you're sick, but how sick? Do you have a simple cold of flu, or do you have Ebola? If you have no fever, does it mean you're not sick at all, when in fact you may have cancer?

I reference the following link for more info on SMART:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

In particular, the following quote is interesting:

"Conversely, little correlation was found for increased temperature and no correlation for usage level. However, the research showed that a large proportion (56%) of the failed drives failed without recording any count in the "four strong S.M.A.R.T. warnings" identified as scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation and probational count. Further, 36% of drives failed without recording any S.M.A.R.T. error at all, except the temperature, meaning that S.M.A.R.T. data alone was of limited usefulness in anticipating failures"

Just exactly how good is a technology that's vendor dependent and may or may not indicate if a real problem exists? I've seen people toss perfectly good drives because SMART technology was reporting trivial errors that they didn't understand, and other drives just drop completely dead with no SMART indicators showing anything. I've also seen some drives last for years after SMART tests predicted an "about to fail any minute" status.

Apple doesn't seem to give SMART reporting much importance, and I suspect it's for good reason.

I would take SMART technology as something to be aware of but not necessarily base my life on. It's not abnormal for a drive to drop a block a few times during its life, and it's actually normal for SSDs to do so.