Drive Genius
Manufacturer: Prosoft Engineering
Retail Price: $99.99

Prosoft Engineering has a complete line of network (Netware Client for Mac OS X) and utility (Data Backup, Data Rescue, Picture Rescue) software products intended to provide superior data management and system maintenance. Drive Genius is a comprehensive collection of tools on one CD: drive initialization, partition and duplication/backup; drive repair; defrag; volume and hardware integrity check; speed benchmark testing, surface scanning and secure erase. It also includes a partition tool that allows for reallocation of disk space without erasing.For many years, the two most powerful and reliable products available for disk and data management have been Micromat's Tech Tool Pro 4 and Alsoft's Disk Warrior. Drive Genius not only fills the void left by Norton Utilities but also provides additional tools for one-stop storage management.

Version 1.1.1 is the newest release of Drive Genius and includes Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) support as well as some enhancements and fixes (one annoyance corrected: you can now boot from the CD without needing to enter the serial number each time). Minimum system requirements include a G3 or better with OS X 10.2 or above. Since nearly all the tasks require booting from the CD (oddly enough, even verifying the drive requires unmounting it first), it's a good idea to install the application on your hard drive, enter the serial number for registration and then boot from the CD to accomplish the tasks you intend to complete. Although it takes rather a long time to boot the CD, it will prevent frustration later.

Try Drive Genius 2, the best hard drive utility on the Mac platform- Defrag, DriveSlim, Repartition-on-the-fly and Clone are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius 2. Recently awarded the Editor's Choice award from MacLife Magazine, Drive Genius 2 is used by Apple at the Genius Bar as part of the ProCare Yearly Tune Up. PROSOFT Drive Genius 3 (1) Write a Review. Retail; Overview. Try Drive Genius 3, the best hard drive utility on the Mac platform- DrivePulse, Defrag, DriveSlim, Repartition-on-the-fly and Scan are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius 3. Drive Genius 6 March 2021 Deals. Get the latest discount on all plans from Drive Genius. With the latest Drive Genius 6 Coupon Code, you can save up to 25% instantly at your checkout. How to get Drive Genius 6 Discount? Choose the right plan for you from below and click on the Get Code/ Get Deal button. The discount automatically applied at.

Prosoft Engineering

1. 'Prosoft's Drive Genius lives up to its name by providing comprehensive disk-repair tools and performance enhancing defragmentation routines to keep your Mac's drive in tip-top condition.' 'You may not need DriveGenius, but your Mac will be more efficient if you get it.'
2. Yes this is the same product used by Apple at the Genius Bar to defrag your drive!Features: Repair - Quickly fix corruption and errors to get your damaged drive up and running fast. Sector Edit - Fine tune all aspects of your system with direct advanced byte viewing and editing.

The main window of Drive Genius is cleanly designed with three panes: volumes and drives are listed on the left vertical side, detailed volume/drive technical specs appear on the adjoining right hand vertical pane and the array of tools/utilities are ranged across the bottom pane of the application window.

To use the Repair function, for example, select your device from the list, select the Repair button and a new window appears with options for Repair.Journaling can be turned on or off here with a simple selection or clearing of the Journaled check box option. The pop down list gives choices for verify, repair, rebuild and repair permissions.

If you select Repair and you haven't started up from the Drive Genius disc, the application will try to unmount your drive and then give you a message that it was unable to unmount it. It would be helpful to have an addendum to the 'Unable to unmount' message that simply instructed the user to boot from the CD.

Defrag or not to defrag? Apple has a knowledge base article on the subject of disk optimization here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668 and it's worth taking a look at. For the purposes of this review I tried two options: one was booting from the Drive Genius CD and running the Defragment option on my primary Powerbook, and the second was mounting my second Powerbook via FireWire and then running Drive Genius on the mounted laptop from my primary Powerbook.The process took just over 4 hours to optimize the 80 GB hard drive when I booted from the CD and ran it locally. It took far less time (1 hour) to run defrag on my older 80 GB Powerbook when it was connected via Firewire. Admittedly, I have been one of those people who advise that defragmentation isn't necessary but after two years of working almost exclusively on my older 12' Powerbook as my primary computer, it was a bit pokey. Did I notice a difference after running through optimizing using Drive Genius? Yes! It's clearly much faster and more responsive. My newer Powerbook also seemed to be much faster after optimization with Drive Genius.

Although the Defragment utility shows a graphical interpretation of the amount of fragmentation on the drive, it would be nice to have some indication of the actual or estimated percentage of fragmentation ('your drive is % fragmented' or some such).To duplicate a drive, Drive Genius uses a device copy technique rather than file-by-file copying. Device copy clones every nuance of the original drive and creates an identical duplicate. This process is also faster than the file copy method. The destination can be either another volume or a disk image. Drive Genius' Duplicate device copy option will also work with OS 9, Linux and Windows file systems.The Sector Edit option is a scary tool that is best left alone unless you are extremely comfortable with modifying bits/bytes on your system.

The Shred option allows you to perform a secure erase of a drive or volume. This is very handy for some situations: selling or otherwise disposing of your hardware; or reformatting hardware in a shared environment (many government and academic institutions require meeting Department of Defense standards for drive sanitation).The Shred and Sector Edit tools should be located at the very end of the panel of option buttons! They are specialized tools with a better than average possibility of disastrous consequences so they should be put out of the way.

The Integrity Check option comprises a collection of diagnostic tools for checking hardware verification by writing and reading various block sizes to and from the drive. Settings that can be adjusted include block transfer size (2 KB for server setups to 16 MB for graphic, digital audio and video applications), length of test (1 minute to 1 day), type of test (sequential read, sequential write, random read, random write) and graph type (bar graph, line graph, raw data).Benchtest is a performance tool that checks drivers, CPU's, OS's and data transfer efficiency of volumes and outputs the results in either graphical or numeric formats. Benchtest will conduct sustained reads/writes and random reads/writes and the results can be compared to an included set of other Macintosh systems. Like the Integrity check tool, results can be displayed by graph type (bar graph, line graph or raw data). Be warned that you have to unmount the volume to conduct both the integrity check and the benchtest utilities so, again, it's advisable to boot from the CD as a matter of course.

A Scan test for surface sector verification is also included as an option in the main window. This utility reads blocks in sequential order and displays bad blocks as it finds them, in real time. Scan won't repair the blocks; to do this you'll need Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) or mount the volume as an external (FireWire) drive on another system with Drive Genius installed and use the Initialize tool.To access the Initialize and Repartition functions, open Drive Genius, select the volume in the left hand pane, select the device button under this pane and the Initialize and Repartition buttons will appear in place of the Repair and Defragment buttons along the bottom of the window. Initializing the drive performs as Disk Utility does: an Apple driver is installed and the clean volume is mounted on the desktop.

The Repartition utility is very cool; it allows you to resize and manage, expand or shrink and create or delete partitions without erasing them. The Repartition window includes a left hand pane with the existing partitions in a list and a new set of buttons at the bottom of the window that correspond to repartition functions (partition info, reset partition map, add a new volume, delete a partition, hide and reveal partitions, shift volumes and resize).

The included Drive Genius Help File in PDF format is very helpful, with ample screen shots associated with each button, which represent particular tasks and provide good explanations of the various included utilities. One improvement request would be that the Show Help.. button on each utility GUI screen actually take the user to the help file specific to that task. As is, when Drive Genius is open, clicking the Show Help.. button merely opens the PDF document.

Overall, Drive Genius provides a comprehensive and reliable set of tools to keep any Mac OS X machine healthy and running in optimal condition. It's a welcome addition to the existing drive and data management and maintenance software choices. If you need any combination of the tools included in Drive Genius, you can't go wrong by making the investment.

Review by NCMUG member Mary Norbury-Glaser

Data Rescue Prosoft

August 3, 2009

Prosoft's Drive Genius 2

http://www.prosofteng.com - $99.00

Review by Steve Douglas

Apple has certainly made it easier over the years to maintain your computer's performance. I recall the days of the G3, and earlier, when I would defrag the hard drive every other week and the time it took to do that. No longer is this as necessary as it was but your data is really only as safe as the condition of your hard drive and while the regular use of the Disc Utility found in your Applications/Utility folder keeps things in good working condition, a more complete and powerful tool may be in order. By regular hard drive maintenance, you protect your disc from failing and losing important data. At the same time, this maintenance can speed up your computer making things run more efficiently.

Prosoft's Drive Genius 2 is like a Swiss Army knife of maintenance tools which comes equipped not only to more efficiently maintain your hard drives but also to provide management and optimization tools. When first installed, either off the Drive Genius 2 DVD, or directly off your hard drive, a unique, graphical, animated interface comes up. There are two pages of possible tools divided into the 3 categories of maintenance, management and optimization. Bringing your mouse over any of the icons brings it quickly forward with the icons name. Should you launch a particular tool, a new window opens up allowing you to specify the hard drive you want to work on. The whole interface of Drive Genius 2 is plain cool to look at even when running any of the different tools.

Corel draw 2019 crack nas?l yap?l?r. Despite current popular believe, hard drives can get fragmented as files grow and shrink.In the maintenance section you have available the ability to defragment either your boot drive or any of your externals. If defragging your boot drive, you would need to do this off the disc and not the installed application should you have previously installed it. This is done by inserting the disc, doing a restart while holding down the C key until it boots off the disc. It took a few minutes to boot up but all went well.

At first a scary screen opens up warning you that possible data loss may occur. Actually, they are doing you a favor, as this is a good reminder that you should have a backup of all data before doing anything.

Don't let it scare you, just remember to clone and back up anything you can't risk losing.

A test utilizing the defrag tool from the Drive Genius 2 installed application on an internal 500 gig extra drive showed me that defragging remains a very time consuming process. My test started at 6:32 pm and by 7:55 it was 42% completed, by 9:06 it was getting there at 73% and just as I walked back into the room at 10:20 pm it finished with 100%. That's a total of 3hrs, 48 minutes for this drive. Of course, the time it might take you would be dependent upon how much was in the drive and its frequency of use. This 500gig drive has seen plenty of trouble free use.

Interestingly enough, after booting from the Drive Genius 2 DVD itself intending to defrag the 750gig boot drive, the defragmentation process took 3 hours, 12 minutes. That's less than the 500 gig internal drive I used for several Final Cut Pro projects.

More than likely running the defragmentation tool on your boot drive which is filled up with applications, plug ins and other necessary data would be expected to be practically a whole day affair so I would recommend running it either overnight while you sleep or on a day that you will not need to use the computer for other purposes.

The disc in the window never stops spinning as the defrag percentage counts down along the progress bar.

While I will not report on each tool's personal use, in addition to the Defragment tool, there is Drive Slim whose purpose is to free up space on your hard drive with duplicate, large file, language support and removal. It also finds files that you haven't used in a long period of time that you may consider removing.

Drive Slim can be quite useful for dumping all the languages you have installed and might never need.
It is also an excellent way to locate ancient files or documents just taking up hard drive space and reclaim that space for more necessary purposes.

Repair, which works just like the Repair Permissions in your Utilities folder but is said to be able to find errors that Disc Utility may not.
The Repartition, allows you to add, delete, hide, expand or shrink OSX partitions for more optimal organization of your hard drives.

Prosoft Drive Genius 3

An excellent graphic layout provides clear and specific illustration of your drive utilization.
Note that my boot drive is not available. I would have to run Drive Genius off the disc to be able to do that.

The Integrity Check enables you to locate problems before they locate you at a crucial moment. What you do should a problem show up is up to you, but at the very least, you will be warned to back the drive up before it crashes all together.

The Clone tool allows you to back up volume or the entire drive. Shred is a supplied tool that removes all traces of data on any drive or OSX volume. This can be set to a choice of 1 to 35 passes for optimal trashing of data.

The Benchtest tool allows you to see a graphical readout of the speed of your drives to compare to your hard drives past performance or to other drives. Info does just that, provides information on space utilization of all drives or OSX volumes. There is a drop down menu to chose the computer that you are using. I run a dual core 3Ghz Mac Pro, but don't see it in the menu. I would imagine there may be a few others therefore who would not be able to get an accurate reading. I mentioned this to their tech support but there really was no clear answer for this.

Initialize allows you to quickly format any new drives you may add to your system. Sector Edit fine tunes all aspects of your system with direct advance byte viewing and editing of all data on your drives, volumes and files. A warning is included with Sector Edit that only expert users should use this. It sounds too dangerous for me so I skipped trying this one out. Additionally there is really no instruction that comes with Drive Genius 2 to show you how to use it properly. Finally, there is the Scan tool, which verifies your drive's reliability with a complete suite of non-destructive read verifications. Basically it finds bad blocks of 50 MBs or more. It works at approximately 3 minutes per gigabyte. I started the Scan program on that same 500gig internal drive I defragged and exactly one hour later it is now 37.8 % complete. Every once in a while, a square filled with streaming ones and zeros comes on Matrix like with a big checkmark inferring that the block just finished scanning is OK. I'm not sure what it would look like if a block were not okay but 2 hours and 31 minutes later the scan was now complete with no bad blocks.

All is good so far.

It goes without saying that it is wise to have a complete backup of all data before using Drive Genius 2. This was confirmed in a conversation that I had with one of ProSoft's very helpful and informative tech support people.

Drive Genius 2.1.1 requires a DVD drive, Mac OS 10.4.9 or newer, 256mb ram and a 1.0 GHz processor minimum. To start up from the bootable DVD, hold down the C key as the computer starts up. With Drive Genius installed, I had no problems at all in using it. Yes, many of the functions do take a long time to complete but you will not need to use Drive Genius that frequently. Just consider it an excellent tool to use as part of your regular computer maintenance tasks and you should be happy.

Steve Douglas is a certified Apple Pro for Final Cut Pro 6 and underwater videographer. A winner of the 1999 Pacific Coast Underwater Film Competition, 2003 IVIE competition, 2004 Los Angeles Underwater Photographic competition, and the prestigious 2005 International Beneath the Sea Film Competition, where he also won the Stan Waterman Award for Excellence in Underwater Videography and 'Diver of the Year', Steve was a safety diver on the feature film 'The Deep Blue Sea', contributed footage to the Seaworld Park's Atlantis production, and productions for National Geographic and the History channels. Steve is also feature writer for Asian Diver Magazine and is one of the founding organizers of the San Diego UnderSea Film Exhibition. He is available for both private and group seminars for Final Cut Pro and leads underwater filming expeditions and African safaris with upcoming excursions to the Red Sea and Egypt for Nov.2009, Feel free to contact him if you are interested in joining Steve on any of these exciting trips. www.worldfilmsandtravel.com

copyright © Steve Douglas 2009

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