All DiskWarrior does is rebuild and optimize your hard drive's directory. That's it, nothing more. But when you consider that the directory is the heart of everything on your hard drive, and that DiskWarrior does what no other repair program can do, that's good.

Consider the directory a database, or rather a catalog for the library of everything in your hard drive. Every time you have a crash, or a program places information incorrectly, hard drive mechanisms wearing out, fragmentation of data, and a wide variety of other conditions can all collect to (at a minimum) make your directory inefficient and/or (at a maximum) non-functioning. If you reach the later stage, your hard drive may not even load onto the desktop. If you reach this stage, reach for DiskWarrior before succumbing to crying.

At a minimum, even if there is no damage currently on your hard drive's directory, it is just about guaranteed not optimized. That is, either fragmented and/or not in an optimized efficient order. Either of these slow the performance of the hard drive for everything from starting and shutting down to opening programs and documents. After running DiskWarrior a noticeable improvement should be seen. More on this later.

There are two restrictions when running DiskWarrior: DiskWarrior cannot be on the startup drive nor can it be on the drive being processed. This means that you must run DiskWarrior from either a bootable CD, or on a different partition of your hard drive (or on a different hard drive).

Beyond that limitation, you can process the directory of any drive that should be able to mount on your desktop. This includes your standard hard drives, zip drives, USB flash drives, etc.

One of the big advances with DiskWarrior 3 is that it comes on a bootable OS X CD. That's the good news. If you have a Mac that can boot up in either OS 9 or OS X, it doesn't make a difference if you repair the directory in either system, both use the same directory. But as you'll read later, rebuilding a directory with OS X information, while in OS 9, can take a considerable amount of time.

The bad news (or inconvenient at most) is that Apple chose to not let anyone create a CD that boots up to a Finder environment. So, after starting your computer off the DiskWarrior CD, you will find yourself working with the DiskWarrior program (one must first enter their computer's administration password).

There is an interesting artifact of this approach: in previous versions of DiskWarrior, after full analysis of the directory was done and prior to replacing the old one with the new one, the user was presented with an option to examine the directory as it is against the directory that DiskWarrior created. One could ostensibly look for files that DiskWarrior couldn't collect enough information on and overwrote the data on the directory. At that point, one could try to salvage what one could prior to DiskWarrior's replacement of the directory.

If you are running this off the CD in the current version, DiskWarrior creates two windows, with the original drive and the newly created one, side by side. This way one can do a side by side comparison. Truth be told I like the new way much more. I'll have some other comments on this issue at the end of the review.

Below is a graph that DiskWarrior creates showing the fragmentation and disorder found in a drives directory. In this case it's the directory of my USB drive (256 MB).

What is shown on the top half of the above window is the fragmentation and (lack of) order of the directory. The thin strip of graded blue on the bottom shows what DiskWarrior will strive for--a smooth, even gradient.

The intent is to have the physical order of the directory match the logical order of the files. Alsoft claims the order should be based on the names and creation order. As the files in the directory vier off this, the drives must search more to find the files. This takes extra time and is more likely to lead to disk reading errors.

After about 3-4 minutes of cranking on the USB drive, DiskWarrior recreated the graph and it appeared as shown below.

Curiously, once optimized, the graph of the directory is posterized as opposed to the smooth gradation of the sample image. I'm not sure why this is so, but it is.

Regrettably, I didn't save the graph image of my main hard drive prior to processing, but I did save a later image. This one is curious in that all I had done was to restart the computer (I had ran DiskWarrior from the CD) and open DiskWarrior. [As this drive is 60 GB, it is considerably longer than the 256 KB drive shown above an is therefore a longer image. It was decreased in size to fit in this review.]

Please note that after not having installed or removed anything, simply restarting and opening a program I already had a few files out of their optimized order. This can explain why after no crashes or other disasters, one might see a decrease in efficiency in their computer's operations. Simply put, Apple's directory is designed to fall into disorder.

But as stated in the beginning of this review, DiskWarrior also replaces damaged directory data.

The following is a copy and paste selection (not the whole report) from the PDF report that DiskWarrior created after rebuilding my hard drive.

What this shows is a listing of all the files that may have problems, their location and an explanation of the types of problems found. (In this case, all files but one had Chinese names--I only displayed the latter two to save space.) As the only problem found had to do with "Text Encoding," that was the only problem defined. When other errors are discovered, more definitions are provided.

One of the big pieces of news with the new DiskWarrior 3 has to do with speed. In this case, speed refers to how fast it does it's job and Version 3 is phenomenally faster than previous versions of DiskWarrior. There are four issues that DiskWarrior has to deal with when examining a disk's directory that can effect DiskWarrior's performance:

• The number of files and folders on the hard drive
• The size of the hard drive
• The speed of the processor - (a dual G4 is a lot faster than a single G3)
• How badly damaged the original directory and how fragmented the drive's contents

Each of these can significantly effect how long it takes DiskWarrior to do its thing. As such, any times I present below must be taken within the context that your mileage will vary.

To compound this, one of the peripheral issues with OS X is that there are inherently a greater number of files and folders than in OS 9 and earlier. Thus, while running version 2.1 to repair the directory in OS 9 of a hard drive that also had OS X, the wait time for the repair process was bordering on intolerable.

Let me tell you, the repair time on a dual 1.25 with a 60 GB hard drive about 60% full was about 7.5 minutes. I didn't have time to go to get a coffee. On my wife's Ti PowerBook (400 MHz), 10 GB hard drive about 80% full took about 16 minutes. It used to take about 45 minutes to an hour.

But the important issue is what good did all this do? On my wife's PowerBook, it was taking 2 minutes,12 seconds after pressing the power button until the login window appeared. After running DiskWarrior it took 1 minute, 16 seconds. On my computer (with a larger hard drive, less percent full and therefore less chance for fragmentation and a faster hard drive and faster machine) the startup to login widow went from 1 minute, 20 seconds to 1 minute, 14 seconds.

What this means is that if you run DiskWarrior on a regular basis, not only are you running preventive maintenance (which we seldom do as often as wisdom tells us we should) we are also gaining increased efficiency for our system and machine. This is really quite nice because normally one cannot tell a difference before and after running any kind of preventive maintenance. Consider: does your car get any better mileage or run any smoother when you change your oil? Or would you rather not change your car's oil until the effects have firmly planted hold.

Keep in mind that as DiskWarrior can only do rebuilding on the directory. You probably will want to also have either Symantec's Norton Disk Utility (see here for a review of Norton SystemWorks by myself and Kirk Hiner) and/or MicroMat's TechTool 3 (see my review) or TechTool 4 (due out in October '03--not reviewed yet).

By the way, a debate occasionally pops up asking if you should run a repair program before or after running DiskWarrior. Alsoft is very adamant about this--run DiskWarrior first. Alsoft claims the other programs will not do as good a job rebuilding the directory and are likely to damage and/or lose data. If the directory is properly rebuilt than the other repair programs will leave it alone and tend to other issues that need service which the other programs do exceedingly well.

But wait, there is a bit more. For a number of years now hard drive manufacturers have built in software into their drives that self-test their efficiency. These drives have what is called "S.M.A.R.T." diagnostics (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). This technology monitors the drives temperature and follows general head patterns to determine if there might be data loss and can also predict if a drive might be impending a failure.

The catch is any messages from S.M.A.R.T might be like the tree falling in a forest when there is no one to hear the sound--the event happened, but who knows?

DiskWarrior 3 has the ability to listen for S.M.A.R.T calls and it has four ways of letting you know what it hears:

• You can ask it: At any time you can start up DiskWarrior, click on the Manual Diagnostics tab and have it test (or listen) to what the software has to say.

Alternatively you can click on the Automatic Diagnostics tab and it can automatically check hourly, daily, or weekly. Furthermore, it can let you know with an Alert on the screen, it can send an email to whomever you feel should receive it letting someone know that an error has been discovered (good for IT people), or lastly, it can run a pre-made AppleScript doing whatever you'd like it to do.

Once you've received a warning that your hard drive is starting to behave mechanically wrong, you (potentially) have a chance to do a final backup prior to its full failure. This is good.

As mentioned, if running DiskWarrior off the CD, one views the older version of the hard drive and the newly created version side by side. Otherwise, if you are running DiskWarrior in a Finder environment, it displays two hard drive image on the desktop for you to compare. They also provide a "mirror" function so if you dig into one folder in one window, the other window digs into the same folder--wonderful. I find I like the CD's approach much more than the previous approach. As long as Alsoft has created the ability to display the data either way, I'd like to see this as a preference (assuming that others may like the original manner of hard drive comparison). However, I'd like Alsoft to do one bit more: Currently, one can take DiskWarrior's report and look for the individual files, dig through whatever folders one has to follow and see if the rebuilt files are satisfactory. As long as DiskWarrior has found the errant files and has built up a full directory of all the files in a manner that can be presented, I'd like to see some arrows on folders that enclose an errant file and as you open each folder containing an arrow you are eventually led to the file in question (with the final arrow on the file) so that being led to the questionable file isn't an ordeal.

Sadly, one of the "components" from previous versions of DiskWarrior that has been removed was the Extension called DiskShield. DiskShield made sure that data was continually written to the directory and examined the directory for potential damage. I'm not sure why it was dropped or whether it is possible for it to ever be returned. However, if one is performing regular efficiency maintenance repairs with DiskWarrior, it's full loss may not be all that significant.

There isn't a Mac out there that couldn't benefit from owning and running DiskWarrior.

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