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Drive Genius is a hard-working hard-drive utility from longtime Mac developers Prosoft Engineering, with the honorable distinction of being employed at the Apple Store Genius Bar as part of their ProCare Yearly Tune Up service.
The interface of Drive Genius shares some similarities with that of its data-recovery sister program Data Rescue: you navigate through a 3D "tool arena," a sort of virtual lazy Susan of hard-drive tasks that's fast and fluid enough to not be annoying (and it's actually kind of fun). You choose from six primary tasks, Information (with detailed readouts on S.M.A.R.T. status, file system type, and more), Defrag (to optimize drive speed), DriveSlim (to free up space by eliminating duplicate or unused files), Repair (to verify, repair, or rebuild a volume), Scan (to check for bad blocks), and DrivePulse (a monitoring tool that checks your drive in the background, when your computer is idle--although unfortunately there's no way to turn off its menubar icon if you decide to use it). You can also flip to the other side of the "tool arena" for even more esoteric tasks: Integrity Check, Initialize, Repartition, Duplicate, Shred (with up to 35-pass Gutmann erasing), Benchtest, and (perhaps scariest of all, "for expert use only") Sector Edit.
Many of these tasks can be time-consuming, but Drive Genius does a good job of keeping you entertained with graphs, lists, and live updates--or you can always just have Drive Genius notify you by email whenever it completes a task. You'll also want the DVD version of this program (which you can either have mailed to you, or download and burn yourself), so that you can work on your drive when it's not running the OS (or when it won't boot at all).
Drive utilities aren't for everyone (and Drive Genius isn't cheap), but if you're interested in keeping your Mac in tip-top shape, it's hard to go wrong with a tool that the pros use. Drive Genius gives you a lot of features in an all-in-one package that's easy to use and understand.
Publisher's Description
From Prosoft Engineering:
Maintain, Manage and Optimize your Hard Drive Is your Mac running slower? Is your hard drive filling up and you don't know why? Are you seeing the beach ball more or having other issues with your hard drive? Try Drive Genius 3, the best hard drive utility on the Mac platform - DrivePulse, Enhanced Defrag, DriveSlim, Enhanced Repartition are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius 3. Drive Genius 3 is used by Apple at the Genius Bar as part of the ProCare Yearly Tune Up.
What's new in this version:
- When purchasing the full version from within Drive Genius, Drive Genius will automatically detect the purchase and register itself.
- Bug fix: potential stability issues with Defrag and Repair.
- Bug fix: stability issue on certain Mac Pro systems.
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All versions:
3.2 starsout of 71 votes
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Current version:
1.0 starsout of 1 votes
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My rating:
Write review
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"Operates like malware. AVOID!"
Version: Drive Genius 3.2.2
Pros
Probably does a good job on defragmenting. Wouldn't know since the thing was so annoying.
Cons
First sign of trouble was that I couldn't seem to close it after running the disk analyzer to see how fragmented my drive was. I couldn't eject the disk image and couldn't shut off the program.
Then when I attempted to delete it, I found that it had installed itself all over the place on my hard drive. Simply dragging the app to the trash like 99% of Mac apps didn't get its tentacles out of my system and something called Drive Pulse couldn't be shut off at all.
I finally uninstalled it completely, but that can only be done by searching online for how to remove it and finding that an uninstall command is somewhere in one of the many menus.
NO program should be this Byzantine to remove from your system. I don't care if it magically added 8GB of RAM to my system, it isn't worth the trouble.Summary
It could be a good product but it behaves like sketchy malware that won't let you get rid of it.
Very bad form on their part. Legitimate companies don't resort to such tactics.
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