DriveDx 1.12.1 — Mac version

People who keep older Macs running, repair volunteers and anyone with a drive that's making funny noises reach for DriveDx. It gives you the real story behind the SMART data Apple hides.

SMART status — Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. The drive's own health check, but DriveDx reads more detail than Disk Utility ever shows.

Self-test — a quick or full scan you trigger. Useful when you suspect trouble but SMART hasn't flagged anything yet.

Background monitoring — let it sit in the menu bar and check periodically. You'll get a warning before a drive gives up entirely.

Diagnostic algorithms — version 1.12.1 improved how DriveDx interprets raw SMART numbers, catching issues earlier on drives like Patriot P200 SSDs.

Newcomer tip: start with a short self-test on any drive you're unsure about. It only takes a couple of minutes and the results are plain-English health indicators, not raw hex codes.

Drive health lives under Disk Utility's hood

DriveDx doesn't replace Disk Utility — it lives alongside it. Disk Utility handles partitions and formatting. DriveDx handles the health of the physical drive underneath. They're different jobs.

It also talks to macOS in ways you might not notice. The menu bar icon can sit next to your clock, changing colour when a drive needs attention. Notifications appear through Notification Centre like any other app. If you run a backup tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or Time Machine, DriveDx can warn you before the backup drive starts throwing errors. That's the bit that saves your files.

Some people pair it with SMART Utility or smartmontools. DriveDx is easier on the eyes than smartmontools — no Terminal needed — but the underlying data comes from the same SMART counters. If you've used those, the health indicators in DriveDx will look familiar, just better explained.

On Apple Silicon Macs the 1.12.1 driver installer skips Rosetta 2 entirely, so it sits natively alongside other ARM apps without an emulation layer chewing through battery.

A session with an ailing SSD

Last Tuesday I was handed a 2015 MacBook Pro that felt sluggish. Finder beachballed opening folders. First step: launch DriveDx.

1. Opened the app. The main window showed the internal SSD with an orange Warning badge. Not red yet, but not happy.
2. Clicked the drive name. The detail pane listed reallocated sectors sitting at 12, with the raw value climbing slowly over the past week according to the history graph.
3. Ran a short self-test. Took about two minutes. It passed, but the health indicators didn't improve — wear levelling was down to 18%.
4. Plugged in an external USB enclosure with a spare SSD. Used the background monitoring pane to confirm the external drive was at 100% health before trusting it with a clone.
5. Set a custom notification threshold for the failing drive so I'd get a ping if reallocated sectors jumped again before I finished the backup.

Twenty minutes later the clone was done and the old SSD went in the recycling box. The warning came early enough that no data was lost. That's the whole point.

No writes to the drive it's checking

Does it write anything to the drive it's checking? No. SMART data is read-only. Self-tests are initiated by a command — the drive does its own internal scan — but DriveDx itself doesn't write to your files or free space. It's safe to run on a drive you're trying to rescue.

Will it slow down my Mac? Day-to-day, no. The background monitor polls SMART every so often and the CPU hit is tiny. A full self-test runs inside the drive's own controller, so your Mac stays responsive.

Can it fix a failing drive? No software can. What it does is tell you when to get your data off, before the drive becomes unreadable. Think of it as a weather forecast, not an umbrella.

Does it work with external USB drives? Mostly yes, but it depends on the enclosure's chipset passing SMART commands through. Most modern USB 3 enclosures do. Thunderbolt drives almost always work. If a drive shows up with limited attributes, a direct SATA connection usually fixes it.

Is there a drivedx license key needed to keep it running? The app works as downloaded. No extra steps required.

Dial alerts down for a degrading drive

Out of the box DriveDx is set up sensibly, but a few tweaks make it fit how you work.

• Notification thresholds. By default you get alerts at Warning and Failing states. If you're monitoring a drive that's already degrading, tighten the threshold so a small change in reallocated sectors triggers a ping. Find it under Preferences > Drive Health Notifications.
• Menu bar temperature display. You can show the drive temperature right in the menu bar. Useful in summer or if your Mac lives in a hot room — SSDs throttle when they overheat, and that shows up as mystery slowness.
• Self-test schedule. Set a monthly quick self-test for your boot drive. It takes two minutes and catches issues between your manual checks. The schedule lives in Preferences > Self-tests.
• Hide healthy drives from the menu. If you've got four external drives but only want alerts about the one that's iffy, uncheck the healthy ones in the menu bar dropdown settings. Less noise.

One thing that catches people out: the driver that enables full SMART access on some Macs needs approval in Security & Privacy. After installation you'll see a prompt. Allow it, restart, and the attribute list fills out properly. Without it some SSDs show only a handful of readings.

• Maintenance release, ready for macOS Sonoma
• Driver installer no longer needs Rosetta 2
• Improved drive diagnostic algorithms and heuristics
• Better support for Patriot P200 SSDs

• macOS 10.9 Mavericks or later
• Apple Silicon and Intel Macs