Question Who to trust? TechTool Pro or Drive Genius?

[jbaugh]

Today a message popped up on my computer screen from Drive Genius that there were three damaged areas on one of my external hard drives. I was advised to copy the data and replace the drive. I ran a complete "Surface Scan" with TechTool Pro on the drive in question. After 6 hours of scanning it reported "No bad blocks encountered". Which one of these results should I trust? Thanks.
John

 

[popatim]

Check the drives SMART with something like CrystalDiskInfo. If the damaged area was reallocated (ie - moved) then TechTool might not have been able to see it.

 

[jbaugh]

Check the drives SMART with something like CrystalDiskInfo. If the damaged area was reallocated (ie - moved) then TechTool might not have been able to see it.

I ran "Smart check" on Techtool Pro and it showed that the drive passed all the tests.
Drive Genius has a "Physical Check" function. When I chose this and asked it to run it reported that it would take 89 days to complete the test. Not very helpful. CrystalDiskInfo seems to be Windows only and I am Mac only. It seems to provide the same basic features that Techtool Pro offers.

 

[popatim]

I distrust pass/fail apps and prefer to see the actual data. You could have a hundred reallocated sectors but still pass but to us - that's a major fail.

Does Smartmontools still work in whichever MacOS you have? That would let us peek at the raw data.

 

[jbaugh]

I distrust pass/fail apps and prefer to see the actual data. You could have a hundred reallocated sectors but still pass but to us - that's a major fail.

Does Smartmontools still work in whichever MacOS you have? That would let us peek at the raw data.

I guess I'm not as knowledgeable in this area as I thought. I found and installed the Smartmontools on my Mac running OS 10.15.4. I tried to run the two items that were installed in my /usr/local/ folder but couldn't generate anything that I could see. I don't like having things installed that I don't have full confidence in. I've had problems with kext files and other things that get installed causing major headaches in the past. I try to keep my system as "clean" as possible. So I finally uninstalled it. I do appreciate your attempt to help me.

 

[popatim]

Have a friend with a Windows PC? or a Bootcamp Windows partition?

 

[jbaugh]

Have a friend with a Windows PC? or a Bootcamp Windows partition?

I have Windows10 running under Parallels on my iMac.

 

[popatim]

And we're right back to my first response.