Drive Genius 5.1 Adds High Sierra Compatibility
macOS 10.13 High Sierra introduces additional security changes which prevent normal applications from accessing the current startup drive’s raw contents.
This change, which is an expansion of the existing System Integrity Protection feature introduced in macOS 10.11 El Capitan, prevents some features of Drive Genius from functioning correctly. As a result, Physical Check and Speed Test will require you to run Drive Genius from a secondary startup drive. Drive Genius can create such a drive for you, using BootWell. These features will still run as normal on macOS versions 10.12.6 and below (earliest supported).
In addition, due to the inability to access the raw data of an APFS drive, Drive Genius does not support Repartition and Defragment of APFS Volume/Partition and Drives.
These features continue to work on non-startup drives in 10.13 and all drives in 10.12 and earlier without needing to restart.
Previously, Drive Genius 5 would prevent itself from launching on macOS 10.13, even if you only wanted to use it on an external drive.
This is the utility that I use to check for bad blocks. It used to be that this particular feature was available for unlimited use with the free demo, with other features not available until you paid. Now, there is instead a fully-featured demo that expires after 30 days.
A free and open source tool for finding bad blocks is dd_rescue, which is on Homebrew (via Pepi Zawodsky).
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Not sure what features you need from a bad blocks test, but my tool iBored can perform a read test on all physical blocks, and report any errors. It doesn't do any reallocation attempts, though.
