[TheIceMan]

SubRosaSoft DiskGuardian� is a collection of tools and helpers that help guard the data on your disks. Integrating SMART monitoring, HFS+ Journaling, Volume Repair, Surface Scanning, Hardware Integrity Checking, Benchtesting, Backup/Restore and Online Reporting, it not only diagnoses and repairs disks, but it can predict many problems long before they occur.

Keeping the focus on guarding data, DiskGuardian performs scheduled regular checks on your hard drive, and will report to your eMail, Web Server, or to reports on your disk.

If any failures are detected you can use the backup and restore functions to recover data long after other Disk Utilities have given up.

I know TTP 4 isn't out yet, but what do you all think of SubRosaSoft DiskGuardian 2.1?

[EDIT:] Also, an OSX bootable CD is suppose to come out in 2-3 weeks I believe. Forgot where I read this though

[CharlesS]

Disclaimer: All comments about TechTool Pro in this post are talking about TechTool Pro 3 in OS 9, since TTP4 is not out yet. Actual results may vary.

TechTool Pro's volume repair is not spectacular. It does rebuild a new directory a la DiskWarrior rather than patching it a la Norton, and it lets you preview the new drive before replacing. These two abilities make TTP much, much safer than Norton. However, it is much slower than DiskWarrior, and when it encounters seriously screwed up drives (such as a drive that has had Norton run on it), in my experience it tends to choke and refuse to do anything. All in all it is safe but not guaranteed to fix serious problems.

DiskGuardian: Who knows? Very little information is available on this utility that I know of. It could be excellent like DiskWarrior, dangerous like Norton, or mediocre like TechTool Pro. This utility is too new to have had extensive field testing. I would personally feel more comfortable with DW at this point as it has had a great track record for a long time.

Other stuff:

DiskGuardian does not seem to have a disk defragger. TTP has a really slow defragger.

DiskGuardian appears to have a backup/restore feature that looks really nice. Looks like it would be a great tool for recovering files off of scratched CD's, dead floppies, etc. I would have loved to have this back in high school when the idiotic school newspaper people kept coming to me with floppies with bad sectors which contained the only copy of the school newspaper files, even though I had told them repeatedly not to do that... wait, I'm getting off-topic.

DiskGuardian and TechTool both have benchmarking stuff, but from looking at the DG web site I would have to say that its benchmarks look better - it can compare the speed of your machine to that of a standard reference system of your choosing. TTP only tells you how many Dhrystones you get, without really letting you know the relevance of that number.

TechTool Pro, of course, has its crown jewel - extensive tests on just about any aspect of your hardware. If you want to be able to test the RAM, ROM, processor, drive mechanism, video card, etc., TechTool is a great utility for this, and AFAIK is the only one available for this type of thing on the Mac.