Checking your drive's health and setup

If something seems off with your external drive, three tools tell you where things stand: Inspect shows the drive's details and checks it's the right one, Verify Setup checks Storage Studio's whole setup including the drive, and the speed test measures how fast it reads and writes.

These check that the drive is connected, recognised and usable. They don't test the drive's hardware for faults — for that, use macOS's Disk Utility and its First Aid.

Inspect

Choose Inspect Fast Drive… from the More menu (in the Advanced view's popover, Inspect in the footer, or ⌘I).

At the top, a status card says one of:

Details shows where it's mounted, its Filesystem, its Volume UUID, whether its Marker file is present (the small file that marks it as Storage Studio's drive), when it was set up and by which Mac, and the free space on both the drive and your Mac.

Under Actions:

• Show in Finder shows the drive in Finder, where you'll find Storage Studio's folder for this Mac.
• Validate checks that the drive is connected, that its marker matches, and that no second drive with the same name is confusing things. It shows Valid or Invalid with the reasons.
• Claim this drive (write marker) appears only when a drive is connected but unmarked. It writes the marker so Storage Studio recognises a drive you've used with it before.

Verify Setup

Choose Verify Setup… from the More menu. The Verify configuration window runs a list of checks one after another, including your configuration, daily schedules, the background service, the folder on your drive, app moves and launching at sign-in. Each row shows a status, and anything that needs attention offers a fix button such as Re-create, Repair or Resume. Anything it can repair, it repairs in place.

For the drive, the row is Storage Studio folder on NVMe:

• Storage Studio folder is in place and marked. — all good.
• Your NVMe drive isn't mounted right now. — plug it in.
• The Storage Studio folder on NVMe is missing or unmarked. — click Re-create.

%% caption: Which check to use for a drive problem
flowchart TD
  A[Something seems wrong with the drive] --> B{Does Storage Studio see it at all?}
  B -->|No| C[Inspect - Not mounted - plug in or Remount Drive]
  B -->|Yes, but not recognised| D[Inspect - Claim this drive, or Verify Setup - Re-create]
  B -->|Yes, but slow| E[Choose External Drive - Run benchmark]
  B -->|Yes, still odd| F[Verify Setup - fix what it flags]

Speed test

Open Set Up / Choose External Drive… from the More menu, select your drive and click Run benchmark. It writes a 128 MB test file to the drive, reads it back and deletes it. The result is marked Speed: looks good, usable with warnings or not suitable — see Choosing an external drive for the thresholds. A drive that has suddenly become much slower than it used to be is worth checking with Disk Utility.

See also: The drive says "not set up", Setting up your drive, When your drive is disconnected, Self-healing.