When you repeat the same action, Disk Utility suddenly discovers that it can perform it without error after all. Sierra’s version of Disk Utility, even in 10.12.6, its last release, is prone to throw an error the first time that you try some actions, such as formatting a USB memory stick. To give it secure access to actions requiring root privileges, storagekitd is a helper, running as root. Disk Utility runs in userland: in Activity Monitor, its user is you. One reason that Apple has adopted this level of complexity is that many of the actions which Disk Utility has to perform require root privileges. This is the StorageKit daemon which runs as root and performs most of the work for Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility in Sierra or later (possibly El Capitan and earlier too), and watch in Activity Monitor for the appearance of storagekitd. More recently, the Disk Utility app has come to rely on a background service, storagekitd, to do much of the hard work for it. High Sierra’s Disk Utility version 17.0 is the first to include support for Apple’s new file system, APFS.ĭisk Utility has a command line equivalent, in the notoriously complex diskutil, with hdiutil, variants of fsck, and other supporting tools. Disk Utility has also been the front end for Apple’s software RAID implementation for OS X. To those have been added different CD and DVD formats, removed when Macs ceased having internal optical drives, and FAT32 and ExFAT formats for USB memory sticks (thumb drives). The core has been the disk image (.dmg file), with its many variants, and the Mac Extended file system, HFS+, on hard disks, Fusion Drives, and now SSDs. The different types of storage supported have changed considerably over the years. Many versions of Disk Utility seem to have suffered from some bug or other, occasionally bad enough to make us throw our hands up in horror. It originated from the Classic Mac OS 9 utilities, Disk First Aid and Drive Setup. It performs a suite of essential and sensitive tasks, working with our storage to format it, divide it into volumes, check and maintain them. Disk Utility is one of the few utilities in the first public beta release of Mac OS X to have survived right the way through to High Sierra.
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