Disk repair utilities: poll results and the bottom line

We received almost ninety comments on our Disk Repair Utilities QuickTopic, atop over nine thousand responses to our poll. Poll results for first and second place were about as close as the Florida presidential election, with DiskWarrior edging out Norton Utilities by less than 100 votes. TechTool Pro was third. With a final total of 9038 votes, the split was: DiskWarrior 3325; Norton Utilities 3234; TechTool Pro 2388; and all others 91. Almost half of the QuickTopic comments listed DiskWarrior as the best choice, and it was also the only one of the big three to collect hardly a single ill word. Many of the users who did not select DiskWarrior as number one made it their second choice, because TechTool Pro and Norton Utilities deliver abilities beyond repairing disk directories, and those users preferred a more complete solution when asked to choose only one program. More than a third of the comments were from users who had all three utilities, and half of the respondents had at least two. For some users, disk utilities were an integral part of a regular preventative maintenance effort, while other users focused on repairing problems after they occurred. It is important to note that a significant number of responses warned that disk repair utilities are no substitute for good backup habits. No other utility in our survey received the same high level of praise and frequent real-world success stories as DiskWarrior. The feature that received the most praise – after its performance - was its ability to reconstruct a directory without first writing anything else to the drive, then offering a preview of the proposed repair. Several users who had access to all three utilities attested that DiskWarrior saved disks that others were unable to fix. David Swift wrote, "We repair 20-30 cranky hard disks a month. So far DiskWarrior is batting about .950. It's performed thus far 6 ‘miracles’ of rescuing disks, including a 2-gig drive where all other utilities fell faint. Norton or TechTool haven't come close to this sort of magic for me." Although in our poll TechTool ran third, in our QuickTopic it ran second, albeit a distant second, collecting only about ten comments from regular users. Its praise was somewhat restrained, and most said they selected TechTool because it was a more complete package, not specifically because of its disk repair abilities. But it too was cited for fixing a disk others could not. One user wrote, "The recent version 3.0.2 identified and repaired four items that DiskWarrior and even TTP 3.0.1 did not identify. And I have had excellent assistance from Micromat Tech Support." Norton Utilities ran a close second in our poll, but the comments placed it at the bottom of the QuickTopic list. A handful of users praised it, but that praise was usually directed toward features other than disk repair. Most of the users who used all three felt NUM was the weakest of the bunch. It was also the only program criticized outright, both for its reliance on the FileSaver extension for doing a complete repair, and for its too frequent lack of success in making repairs. Comparing these utilities can be an apples and oranges proposition, as each one has a different feature set that diverges into territory unique to itself. However, based on these reader replies and when evaluated strictly on the utilities' ability to repair damaged hard disks, DiskWarrior is the clear standout and should be the first tool you reach for when a disk-related emergency strikes. However, having the other utilities on hand plus employing a good backup strategy greatly improve the odds that a crisis will not become a disaster.