MacDirectory Magazine

REVIEW DRIVE GENIUS 3 >HEAL WORDS BY RIC GETTER THCARE FOR YOUR MAC (weekly). These regular checkups may be overkill for some users, however they’ll be a godsend for people who do a good deal of multimedia production. Capturing, editing and playing back audio and video can be brutal on a hard drive, both physically and on the directory structure. DrivePulse can help point out an issue while your data is still intact. Solid Defragmentation It can be said that the health care capital for the Mac OS lies a dozen or so miles north of Cupertino, Calif., in an appropriately named town called Pleasanton. It is the home of Prosoft Engineering, a company that has made its name with a series of utilities that excel at protecting and recovering your data as well as a best-of-breed suite of drive maintenance and repair tools that help you avoid the necessity of the others. Soon after Macs moved to OS X, Prosoft picked up where Norton’s left off and frankly did a much better job. The latest version of the company’s flagship program arrived this spring and it represents a worthwhile update of an already excellent program. The biggest change to Drive Genius 3is that it’s now a 64-bit application when running under Snow Leopard, making it a noticeably snappier tool to work with. It also enhanced several of its existing features and added a few new ones that are bound to expand the suite’s user base. The most obvious addition to the Cover Flow-like arena of Drive Genius tools is a feature called DrivePulse, a real time and full-time menu bar monitor of your drive’s health. It monitors your drives for hardware issues, data and directory integrity and fragmentation. You can select any or all of the three parameters, however, there’s no apparent way to change the frequency of the scans You’ll hear a lot of discussion among Mac and Unix geeks about the need for defragmenting disk drives, a task that takes files that have been split into different sections on a hard drive and reunites them. In Windows, there’s no debate; a fragmented disk can really bog things down. The Mac OS and Unix handle fragmentation more elegantly and there are some who insist that it shouldn’t be an issue. Until Drive Genius 3, this has been good news because there really hasn’t been an OS X application (including earlier versions of Drive Genius) that handles defragmentation really well. Drive Genius 3 has taken one of the program’s more marginal features and turned it into one of its greatest assets. It provides accurate reporting of the amount and location of the fragmentation and extremely detailed graphing of the drive’s state. Secondly, its speed is incredible. It’s faster than any tool we’ve seen on the Mac and even compares favorably to the best third-party tools available for Windows (and those guys have had a lot of practice at writing defrag routines). Another new tool the multimedia set will appreciate is RAID support, although this feature is limited to Apple’s software RAIDs and external hardware-based RAIDs. Virtually all DG3’s features will work with the logical volumes created by the RAID. All of the features that have helped make Drive Genius so popular are still available. DriveSlim will search out large, unused files, trim out international localizations and strip PowerPC code from Universal Binary applications. The Scan tool will check a drive for bad blocks and also serves as a thorough workout to test a new drive before you put it into service. Since Leopard, the Mac OS has been able to add and resize partitions without erasing data (this was an extraordinarily useful feature of the earlier Drive Genius releases), however the program still provides some added flexibility for performing these tasks and adds the ability to hide a partition. The program continues to offer sector editing and bench testing tools as well as some others that, although redundant to Disk Utility, are handy to have available when you’re booted to the Drive Genius disk. Drive Genius remains a program that is a virtual necessity to all but the most casual of Mac users. The sprightliness of 64-bit native performance is more than enough reason for the upgrade, though the greatly improved defragmentation tool and RAID support are welcome additions for power users. At $99 for the full version and $49 for the upgrade, it’s unquestionably a health care bargain for your Mac. Product Drive Genius 3 Made by Prosoft Engineering Price $99.99 ($49 Drive Genius 2 upgrade; $75 competitive upgrade) Pros Speedy, 64-bit performance; improved problem-prevention tools; top-notch defragmentation; RAID support Cons No control over DrivePulse’s maintenance intervals; Some redundancy with Apple’s Disk Utility System Requirements OS X 10.5.3 or later (Intel only) Rating ★★★★ 96 MacDirectory

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