This feature may be particularly useful to laptop users, as you don’t need to bring the TechTool Pro DVD with you when you travel. Creating the eDrive took about 45 minutes on my Mac Pro, and it then booted perfectly, displaying a custom desktop picture that left no doubt that I wasn’t booted from my normal drive. The eDrive is created directly within TechTool Pro 5, though to create an eDrive on your boot drive, you’ll need to reboot using the TechTool Pro DVD first so your boot disk isn’t active. You can’t, however, set different warning levels for different drives. You can easily exclude and include drives by using the check boxes. TechTool Pro will monitor your drives’ free space at intervals you define, watching for it to drop below a level you specify. During normal use of the machine, though, I never noticed this activity. On my Mac Pro, the background process was typically under 0.5 percent of CPU usage, with occasional spikes to 3 percent to 5 percent for a couple of seconds. In my testing, using the Protection panel had a minimal impact on resource utilization. You can set up alerts (on screen and via e-mail) to let you know when any of your drives or partitions drops below a defined percentage of free space, and you can set the time interval between such checks and specify which volumes will be checked. In addition to these as-needed tests, TechTool Pro includes the TechTool Protection System Preferences panel, which lets you automate some tests and reports. With a simple pass/fail for the entire drive, I wouldn’t have been aware of this potential problem.
Either way, I know that I need to make sure my backups for that drive are up-to-date, as it may be on the verge of failure. One of my drives, for instance, passes its S.M.A.R.T tests but shows a nearly failing score for temperature changes-perhaps a sign of impending failure, or perhaps just an oddity with that drive. Instead of simply reporting pass or fail, as do many other tools, TechTool Pro displays a chart showing 18 separate tests, with an indicator for each test showing the results along the pass/fail scale. One test I was particularly impressed with was the S.M.A.R.T. You can also access each test individually from the Tests screen, to run it on an as-needed basis.
You can cancel any individual test by clicking its X button. The Check Computer test runs a full series of tests. It’s best to run such tests overnight, when you can leave the computer alone for a number of hours. Running the full suite of tests can be very time consuming, especially on systems with lots of files and folders the surface scan and file structure tests in particular are lengthy. An all-encompassing Check Computer test runs the full suite of tests, though you can disable individual portions of the suite quite easily-each task appears as a separate icon in the interface, with its own “x” button to cancel that task. TechTool Pro’s test suite covers pretty much everything you’d ever want to test on your Mac.
You can run all of the specified tests and tools at any time, even when not booted from the eDrive-you just can’t make repairs to your boot drive unless you boot from the eDrive (or a different drive) first, so it’s not active and can be unmounted. You can also rebuild a disk’s directory, defragment files, and consolidate free space on disks, securely erase files or free space, calibrate audio and video, repair permissions, and recover accidentally deleted files or those located on a damaged disk. You can use this booted system to try to repair the broken boot disk. The eDrive lets you reboot your machine-if your boot drive has died, or if you just want to do some work on it-to a special startup partition equipped with TechTool Pro 5 and a few system utilities. On the tool side of the program, you can create a special recovery partition that Micromat calls an eDrive.
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