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Can I tell whether my hard drive has been cloned? I had a repair done and do not know what they performed on the computer; they may have replaced my hard drive with the same model and cloned my information to it- I am not entirely sure if they did this. I have a Macbook Pro, 2012 model.

I read online somewhere that the Volume Creation date, or "date created" would update to the time when the clone was done- basically when the volume was created on that new drive. All other information would be identical. Is this one way to tell...? Please let me know. Thanks all!

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  • are you saying they gave you new drive and will not tell you about it ?
    – Ruskes
    Dec 4, 2018 at 1:44
  • They don't know and they can't because they made no record of the repair... I really just did not have a good experience with them and would like to see if this did in fact happen.
    – GrownShades
    Dec 4, 2018 at 3:38
  • try the simple way, open the Activity Monitor > Disk and look at bottom right, for Data read and data written. Tell me that number.
    – Ruskes
    Dec 4, 2018 at 3:40
  • Data read: 1.36 GB Data written: 349 MB.
    – GrownShades
    Dec 4, 2018 at 4:33
  • 1
    Unfortunately I think this number resets afters powering off :(
    – GrownShades
    Dec 4, 2018 at 4:33

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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On your Mac, you can use Terminal to see the amount of data you've written to your drive.

Open Terminal and enter the "diskutil list" command.

Find your physical drive on the list, which includes partitions and virtual disks. In my case, my physical is disk0.

It is usually disk0.

Enter this command: "iostat -Id disk0" or similar (depending on the number for your drive).

You will see three values listed:

KB/t = kilobytes per transfer
xfrs = number of transfers
MB = number of megabytes transferred

The value listed under MB is the total number of megabytes that you have written to your drive from when it was first installed to now.

In your case been 2012 model I suspect somewhere around 500GB (500,000MB) to 1000GB...or more.

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  • Would this number be different if the drive was wiped /reinstalled?
    – GrownShades
    Dec 4, 2018 at 6:16
  • I wouldn't think that it would be @GrownShades
    – Sam
    Dec 4, 2018 at 6:18
  • Now if it was an already used disk, you may not be able to tell the difference
    – Sam
    Dec 4, 2018 at 6:19
  • A wipe and reinstall was done in 2016 - my values are 71.86 KN/t, xfrs is 550k and MB is 38k.
    – GrownShades
    Dec 4, 2018 at 6:25
  • That’s odd - the values change/ increase every time I type in the code. Now it’s at 74k MB
    – GrownShades
    Dec 4, 2018 at 6:28

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