Brief Hands-On Report--TechTool Deluxe 3.1.1 (Universal)

On Friday, Micromat released the 3.1.1 updater to its TechTool Deluxe hardware testing and disk maintenance application. Apple provides TechTool Deluxe with AppleCare and it is a somewhat stripped down edition of Micromat's commercial product, TechTool Pro.

The main feature of version 3.1.1 of TechTool Deluxe is that it is now a universal binary so that it runs on Intel-based Macs. Micromat also added the ability to check volume structures on the startup volume and to attempt to repair any problems that it finds. This feature was formerly relegated to Mac OS X's Disk Utility application. Version 3.1.1 also drops the Diagnostic and Rezero Unit tests and adds Drive Hardware and Directory Scan tests for a total of 16 tests.

We updated our version of TechTool Deluxe from v3.0.3 to v3.1.1 with no problem. Then we ran v3.1.1 on our 2.16GHz MacBook Pro. Except for the Surface Scan test, TechTool Deluxe took just a few minutes to check out our MacBook Pro. It found no problems so we couldn't test its repair capability. The Surface Scan test took nearly 40 minutes to check the 194,700,000 blocks on our 100GB 7200rpm internal hard drive and found no bad blocks. Unfortunately, TechTool Deluxe would not check our attached 80GB FireWire hard drive that we use for backups and an emergency boot drive.

While we are glad to have TechTool Deluxe 3.1.1 (Universal) that now works on Intel-based Macs, we await the delivery this week of the TechTool Pro 4.5.1 (Universal) CD for more complete protection. [Bill Fox]