Alsoft today released DiskWarrior 4.
DiskWarrior 4 maintains, repairs, and recovers Mac disks on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs as the application is now a Universal Binary.
DiskWarrior 4 costs US$99.95 for the full version and $49.95 for the upgrade.
More info: http://www.alsoft.com/
Apple investors have reason to feel encouraged today. As the tech giant prepares to report its Q3 2026 earnings on April 30, UBS has raised…
“Widow’s Bay” is a quaint island town 40 miles off the coast of New England. But something lurks beneath the surface. Mayor Tom Loftis…
Apple is developing a new suite of AI features powered by its Apple Intelligence platform, set to debut in the upcoming iOS 27, iPadOS 27…
Apple’s all-new MacBook Neo, its most affordable laptop ever, starts at just $599 (and $499 for education customers), bringing the full Mac…
Apple is poised to make a significant leap in memory configuration for its entire 2027 iPhone 18 lineup. According to recurring supply-chain…
Does this thing defrag too?
I upgraded my copy. The purchase price and upgrade fees have paid for themselves several times over.
@ moiety5 –
Yes, and repairs and runs diagnostic tests also.
You don’t need to defrag. After 18 months of intensive use I checked out my drive with a fragment inspector just out of curiosity. It compared favourably with my ext3 Linux partitions at under 6% fragmentation. That’s on a disk with less than 10% free space.
Thanks R.
Are there any free fragmentation inspectors that would tell me what I’m looking at mindpower??
Going back to my TechTool days here, isn’t defragging uneccesary with the latest versions of OSX?
I believe OS X auto-defrags small files. Larger files it doesn’t. There is debate about whether defragging all the files on your system has any value. However, it is possible for a drive to become highly fragmented; I’ve had “severe” fragmentation on my drives. Again, I don’t know how bad “severe” fragmentation is as far as speed and wear-and-tear on the drive.
How does DiskWarrior compare to Techtool Pro. Haven’t needed any utilites for a few years….. but always nice to be prepared.
To add to DistantThunder’s comments, those that do video editing on their systems may work with many huge files that are 12 GBs or more. One hour of DV video takes about 12 GB and some HD formats can use 48 GBs or more per hour.
Also wondering….
How does it compare to TechTool Pro?
Anyone care to point to a review, or provide a short one of their experience with both?
TIA
Fscking A!
Disk Warrior is the premium “Disk Repair” Utility ….
If it can’t fix what’s ailing your drive ….you’ll have to bring your machine into the shop ..
It has saved me from doing that at least 4 times
Also … it will warn you if your drive is about to fail …. Run it about twice a year on its own for absolutely worry and trouble free computing.
Worth its weight in gold ….
Solve a myriad of problems …. gives you a brand spanking new directory.
Disk Warrior has saved friends data several times. Version 3 does not work on Mactel, now they want another @ for a working version?
Thanks guys!
Eric ~
Spoken like a true Alsoft apologist!
Actually, version 3.0 and later do not include the defrag utility. The previous Mac OS 9 (and earlier) version included a defrag utility call Plus Optimizer. The one situation where a defrag utility is still helpful under Mac OS X is if your boot drive (or volume) is unusually small (as in less than 10 GBs). Then, your free space will be only a few GBs, and the drive can get quite fragmented because the OS uses that free space for its virtual memory swap file.
This is good timing; just in time for MacWorld San Francisco. I bought my version 3 upgrade at MacWorld for a discount, and I’ll probably do it again next month.
I ran a 30-Mac computer lab for nine years, until June 2006.
Diskwarrior repaired more computers than any other utility, by a factor of ten. One out of forty times or so, DiskWarrior could not recover a Mac that another utility did. If you can only afford one repair utility, and now that I’m no longer maintaining a whole lab, get DiskWarrior.
DiskWarrior also saved the stuff on my own personal Macs several times over the years. I have ordered my update already.
For a FREE fragmentation checker (NOT fixer) see ShowVolumeFrag at:
http://people.freenet.de/amichalak/page1/page1.html
I’ve used it – it seems to provide a lot of information.
Note that this is a graphical front-end to another program you will also need to download – the details are included at the above link.
IMHO disk warrior was without equal for OS9…back in the day, it displayed almost supernatural abilities to boost performance and bring back suposedly dead machines from beyond the grave. It paid for itself dozens of times over; saving important data and expensive machines for my organization more times than I can count. Back then I recomended it to all mac owners. Honestly, I have found the OSX version to be a bit less reliable and not quite as likely to “save the day when all else fails”. I have had several experiences with it looking at various bad HDs for (what feels like) forever and then just giving up and saying it can’t fix it, even if the drive is actually still working. The OSX versions I have used also seem a bit picky and tempermental about which specific mac models they can successfully boot. My final complaint is that my cheap ass is a bit annoyed by always having to pay for new versions. Nonethless, the consensus amongst the Mac techies I know is that it is still the best (if not the only) mac utility to invest your money in, just don’t expect the same miracles that you might read about in old archived forums from a few years back.
One time, Disk Warrior gave me a hand job and it was so good I’d never think about any other software ever again.
What about DiskWarrior vs Drive Genius?
anyone have experience with both of these?
If you want to defragment your main drive just back it up to your external backup drive (using Carbon Copy Cloner or similar) then erase your main drive and restore from your backup. Guaranteed defragmentation! That’s the simple way, the safest way and it costs nothing.
As a longtime user of Disk Warrior, I am appalled with the new requirements of the program in version 4.0. Alsoft now demands you purchase a separate copy of the program for each and every Mac you wish to use it on. I have two Macs in my home. In addition, they refuse to download the program to you after you pay the fees, insisting rather that USPS will be the only delivery method available and that will take 4 weeks!
I don’t know how good or bad 4.0 is — nobody else will, either, for at least another month! 3.0.3 was slow, but a good utility. Drive Genius takes a different approach but is well executed and every bit as good — more features, too. And the upgrade CD cost one fifth what this one did.
My recommendation is to wait until a few reviews are forthcoming before paying for this developer’s arrogance.
What about Leopard compatibility?
I don’t want to upgrade now, only to find that I have to pay for another upgrade to get Leopard support.
Anyone know?
I understand DW is good, but why isn’t something as good as it not offered by the company that should know more about the issues DW fixes? I mean, Apple, of course.
A quick note for update/upgraders:
If you have the Application Enhancer haxie installed on your Mac, be sure to access the “Master Exclude List” therein and add DiskWarrior 4.0. Until you DO, DW4 will hang and give you the spinning beach ball until a force quit.
A word to the wise . . .