Charles Moore Reviews Drive Genius 1.1.5 Disk/System Diagnostic, Repair, and Management Tools Suite
However, with the transition to OS X, Norton's reputation for reliability suffered, and the developer, Symantec announced last year that development of the product would cease, and that it would not be supported beyond OS 10.3 (development of the Windows version of Norton will be continued),
The most promising candidate to take the place of Norton Utilities as the dominant disk tools suite software for Mac OS X is Drive Genius. a collaborative effort of Prosoft Engineering and New Zealand's SubRosaSoft. Drive Genius, which incorporates and expands on the feature sets of several Mac OS utilities developed by SubRosaSoft, particularly Disk Guardian (which Drive Genius replaces), the VolumeWorks disk partitioning tool, and others.
Like Norton SystemWorks, Drive Genius is a suite of disk maintenance, repair, management, and optimization tools designed from the ground up specifically for Mac OS X. Drive Genius's powerful toolkit includes a drive optimizer, a comprehensive repair facility for analyzing, repairing and rebuilding volumes, plus testing capabilities with media surface scanning, performance benchmarking and data integrity checking. It can be used to initialize drives, create and delete partitions, and erases them securely as per Department of Defense's standard. Drive Genius can also hide partitions and duplicate volumes or drives swiftly. Last but not least, Drive Genius features advanced tools for resizing and moving of volumes without reformatting, and sports a sector editing tool to modify the data on any sector of the drive -- powerful features that will satisfy even the seasoned Mac experts.
I first reviewed one of the very early release builds of Drive Genius here back in February, but there have been a couple of significant update releases since then, and I've upgraded to both as I continued to use of software, so the release of version 1.1.5, which supports booting in OS 10.4 Tiger from its CD, seemed like a cue to update my impressions in another review.
Since the Drive Genius version 1.0 I tested back in February, Version 1.1 added:
• Updated internal manual.
• Additional checking before volume duplication.
• New free space shredding feature.
• Attach Disk Image feature allows mounting of disk images while booted from CD
And Version 1.1.5 includes:
• New OS 10.4 based bootable CD.
• Additional checking to handle a volume that cannot be repaired.
For basic disk maintenance and diagnostics there is of course Apple's own Disk First Aid/Disk Utility application, which is better now in OS X than it has ever been. OS X users can also utilize the fsck -y UNIX command to run a disk diagnostic and repair routine from the Console or started up in single user mode.
However, with Drive Genius you can not only diagnose and repair disk problems, but also optimize drive performance, protect data, defragment a volume, analyze a volume and repair it if necessary, and execute other tasks like media surface scanning, measuring the throughput of drives to see if they are performing up to par, and long term data integrity checking. Drive Genius's repartitioning feature enables you to resize your drive without erasing and reformatting, and can be used to add, initialize and delete partitions. Additionally, Drive Genius can do volume and device copying, and is is able to hide partitions from most users, to move a partition on the hard drive and even has a sector editing function to edit the data on any sector of the drive, while its shredding feature that erases drives securely per the Department of Defense's standard.
Drive Genius has comprehensive hardware support including ATA, SCSI, Firewire and USB drives, and includes bootable CD-ROM support for OS X capable machines ranging from first generation iMacs to the latest PowerBooks.
The program's user interface design owes a great deal in appearance to SubRosaSoft's Disk Guardian � heavy on the "brushed metal," which does not suit my aesthetic taste, but it is clean and functional.
Most Drive Genius functions require a fairly intuitive three-step process to complete a task:
1. Select a hard drive or volume in the main window.
2. Select an operation.
3. Select a parameter and apply it to the drive or volume.
For operations such as copying, partition resizing and sector editing, you need to enter additional information pertaining to the operation. Shredding, get details, benchtest, integrity testing and initialize don't require any additional information. Once you enter the parameters for the operation, click the Drive Genius icon to complete the task.
Prosoft sensibly recommends backing up your data before using many of the features in Drive Genius and regularly; that way, if anything goes wrong (virus, power blackout, OS error or hardware failure etc…), you will be able to recover your data.
To Verify or Repair a volume, the core function in drive maintenance software, select from the popup menu whether you want to verify, repair, rebuild the volume, or repair permissions.
Journaling
Note that Apple's journal file system keeps a log of the hard drive's main data activity. In the case of a crash or other system failure, the file system can retrieve lost data by consulting the "journal" log, restoring the system to its previous state instead of having to go through the lengthy process of rebuilding it. The downside is that enabling Journaling can slow drive access time down by up to 10% � an issue of particular concern to us laptop (or Mac mini) users, whose drives are on the poky side already. In certain instances nevertheless, Journaling can be preferable in situations where data stability is more important than drive access speed. Personally, I prefer to keep it turned off on my 'Books. Drive Genius lets you conveniently turn Journaling on and off. In the volume view, select a mounted volume you want journaling to be turned on/off. Click the icon on the bottom of the window. From the Repair window, check or uncheck the Journaled check box to turn journaling on or off.
To turn journaling on/off with Drive Genius: In the volume view, select a mounted volume you want journaling to be turned on/off. Click the icon on the bottom of the window. From the Repair window, check or uncheck the Journaled check box to turn journaling on or off.
Demounting disks required
One aspect I find frustrating about Drive Genius is that it requires the volume on which you are running a process to be demounted, so you can't even run a verification check on the disk you're booted from. SubRosaSoft's Disk Guardian (and Norton Disk Doctor) will happily verify the directory of your boot disk, and will run a repair routine as well, although a dialog appears suggesting that it would be better to boot from another disk first. Nevertheless I've found that a couple of passes with either application usually does the trick without rebooting to another volume, restoring "appears to be OK" status with a minimum of delay or hassle.
With Drive Genius, however, you will unfortunately have to either boot from another volume or the Drive Genius CD even to do a simple directory verification. I hate booting from CDs. Starting up takes forever, and when Drive Genius finally appears, you are obliged enter the very long serial number before the program will run. Having Drive Genius loaded up and registration key configured on a bootable external FireWire or USB 2 drive is a much preferable solution. I just wish they would let the verification/repair routine take a shot at fixing the boot volume.
Defragmenting
Adding and deleting files to and from your hard drive will gradually cause your hard drive to become more and more fragmented. When the OS writes files to the drive, it will look for empty spaces on the hard drive to write data to. If the space is too small to fit the file, it will write part of the data in one area and the remaining to another area. This way less overall disk space is wasted, but drive access will slow down, as the read/write head has to scan multiple parts of the drive to locate and read a file. The more you use your your drive, the more fragmented the data on it will become. Consequently, defragmenting your hard drive from time to time can boost the performance of your computer by putting all of these broken up pieces into one continuous block with all of the empty space at the end.
To defrag your drive with Drive Genius, you select the Volume you want to defragment by highlighting it. once the volume integrity is successfully verified, the defrag process can begin.
The screen shows the fragmentation of the volume:
• The yellow portion represents the data has already been defragmented.
• The lavender portion represents file that hasn't been moved yet.
• The black portion represents the free space.
Here's what the fragmentation map of the 11 GB main partition on my iBook's 20 GB hard drive looked like at the start of the process.
Drive Genius gives you a running readout of what is happening as the defragmentation proceeds. It is not a quick process, especially on an OS X boot volume with all those tens of thousands of tiny files (files 173,643; Folders: 33,485 in this case).
The program had to reorganize roughly 2.5 million blocks of data on the partition, which took about six hours. ProSoft warns that it can take from half an hour to a day to defrag a high capacity drive (depending on how fragmented it is). I expect that it would go more quickly and on a machine with a faster processor and/or hard drive. The process was happy to run in the background, and I was able to continue working with the computer and even go online.
Here's the finished job:
Worth the effort? Apple has posted a Knowledge Base article on Disk Optimization And Fragmentation With Mac OS X, which is worth a read before making any defragging decisions.
However, after defragging my iBook's drive, performance did seem zippier, with less hard disk accessing time. It's not something I wouldn't be inclined to use a lot, but it's a nice tool to have in your disk maintenance tool kit.
More Drive Genius features and functions:
In a nutshell, here's what Drive Genius has to offer:
Essential Maintenance Tools
• Duplicate - Fast and easy volume or entire drive cloning.
• Integrity Check - Find problems before they find you with these comprehensive hardware verification tests
• Repair - Quickly fix corruption on OS X volume structures to get your damaged drive up and running fast
• Rebuild - Rebuild and replace OS X volume structures to regain access to files that have become lost or hidden
• Verify - Check OS X volume structures for possible corruption
• Fix Permissions - Reset OS X boot volume permissions to improve application performance and compatibility
• SMART Status - Read and display SMART diagnostic codes from your hard drive to avoid dangerous hardware failures
Optimization Tools
• Defragment - Get the most speed and efficiency possible by Optimizing your OS X volumes
• Benchtest - Make sure your hard drive performance is what it should be with comprehensive speed tests and graphical comparisons to other common configurations
• Surface Scan - Verify your hard drive's reliability with a complete suite of non-destructive read verification tests for any drive or OS X volume
• Sector Editor - Fine tune all aspects of your system with direct, advanced byte viewing and editing of all data on your drives, volumes and files ( recommended for expert users only)
Management Tools
• Partition - Add, delete, hide, expand or shrink OS X partitions so you can organize your data more efficiently
• Shred - Stop prying eyes with DoD compliant (5220.22 - m) secure erase. Removes all traces of data from free space and deleted files on any device or OS X volume
• Details - In-depth report of specifications and space utilization of all devices and OS X volumes
• Initialize - Easy, high level OS X formatting to prepare new hard drives for use on your computer
In detail:
Duplicate
The Drive Genius Duplicate function, which appears to be based on SubRosaSoft's CopyCat, copies all the information from the source drive to the destination drive. A copy of the source drive is made to the destination, so if you backup your startup drive, a bootable copy of it is created, with all information such as file permissions preserved.
Unlike some backup programs which copy file-by-file, Drive Genius utilizes a method called device copy. Using device copy enables you to retain every detail of the original drive, from bootablity to the icon locations. Device copy is also a lot faster than the traditional file-by-file backup.
Drive Genius also supports duplication of drives and volumes. For drive copy, Drive Genius will duplicate an identical copy of the drive. For volume copy, an identical volume is first duplicated, and then Drive Genius will apply a proprietary resizing technology to expand the volume size to the maximum, so no space is wasted. Duplication can be to another drive or to a disk image file.
To Duplicate your volume, launch Drive Genius or boot from the Drive Genius CD. In the Drive Genius Volume window, select the volume you want to backup. The information on the target drive will be replaced with the information on the source volume. If you want to archive to a file instead then select "New Disk Image" as the target.
To Duplicate a device, launch Drive Genius or boot from the Drive Genius CD.
In the Drive Genius Device's window, select the device you want to clone. Select the target device from the pop-up menu. Click the button to proceed.
To cancel, click on the button. Drive Genius requires the source and the target devices to be unmounted before proceeding with the duplication. You will need a Drive Genius bootable CD or start up from another drive.
Sector Edit
Drive Genius' Sector Edit allows expert users the ability to access and modify bits and bytes of a volume or a disk. It is strongly suggested that you not use this function unless you are extremely proficient with raw hex data, which I am emphatically not. Editing the data using Sector Edit may render your data files unreadable, or even corrupt your drive.
To perform a low level Sector Edit on your drive, in the Drive Genius Volume window, select the volume you want to perform a sector edit. You can also perform sector edit on a device by selecting a drive under device view. You can use the sector edit window on any file by using the file menu to open a document.
I did not try this. See the Drive Genius documentation for full details.
Speaking of which, Drive Genius ships with a very thorough, nicely illustrated PDF user's manual. Also included in the manual is a tutorial by Dave Bayer on "Moving the swap file in OS X,": which can also be read here:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~ bayer/OSX/swapfile/
Shred
Drive Genius' Shred function may be used for securely erasing the contents of a volume or the whole drive. Reasons to perform a shredding operation instead of simply dragging the files into the trash and emptying it might include:
• To avoid identity theft and protect your credit.
• Stop intellectual property theft.
• Permanently get rid of your data files so no one can recover it.
• Most Government/large corporations require the drives to be securely
erased before disposing or transferring to other users.
The only secure way to erase your drive is by writing repeated passes of various data patterns.
Shred overwrites the volume or the drive with three passes and ensures all previous data will never be recoverable. Drive Genius's Shredder function conforms to the U.S. Department of Defense standard for drive sanitization (DoD 5220.22 M), and it works with IDE (ATA), SCSI, USB, and Firewire hard drives. The current version of Shredder does not support RAID drives.
Drive Genius can shred either a volume or the whole drive. If you are shredding your boot volume or your startup drive, you will need to boot the system from the Drive Genius CD, or boot of from another drive with Drive Genius installed.
Integrity Test
Drive Genius's Integrity Test is a suite of diagnostics designed to test the overall integrity of the drive by writing and reading various block sizes to and from the drive. Integrity Test measures and reports various aspects of the drive subsystem including the driver, the drive controller, the cabling, the drive's motherboard and the head seek mechanism.
The transfer size ranges from 2 KB to 16 MB. For setup such as mail server or accounting server, test the drive at 2 KB block. Database servers do lots of little searches and hardly ever read lots at a time so small blocks are a good test. Use a bigger block size if you use the drive for graphic intensive application and digital audio and video applications.
The length of test can be varied from one minute to one day. The longer the duration given to the test, the more reliable the results are. Start with smaller time frames and give it a longer period to detect more subtle flaws.
Benchtest
Drive Genius Benchtest is a tool, also owing a great deal to Disk Guardian's similar functionality, to test the performance of different drivers, CPU's, operating systems, and data-transfer efficiency of large and small volumes. For example, digital video users can use Benchtest to see how differing custom driver and mode page settings affect the efficiency of video capture and web server administrator can find out how the volume performs under small file transactions.
Benchtest reports the results in either graphical or numeric formats. You can export the results as high quality images, or save them as files. You can also import files that others have saved and Drive Genius comes with a set of them from most current Macintosh systems. You can select these for a live on-screen comparison between your system and others.
Benchtest will perform the following tests on the drive selected:
• Sequential read test measures how many times single-block reads can
be performed in one second. This test is affected by read caching (the larger the read cache, the faster
the performance).
• Sequential write test measures how many times single-block writes can be performed in 1 second. This test is affected by write caching (the larger the write cache, the faster the performance).
• Random read test measures drive performance for reads of blocks of
data from 2 kilobytes to 16 megabytes. For small block sizes, seek time and rotational latency are weighted more heavily. For large block sizes, the transfer rate is weighted more heavily.
• Random write test measures drive performance for writes of blocks of
data from 2 kilobytes to 16 megabytes. For small block sizes, seek time and rotational latency are weighted more heavily. For large block sizes, the transfer rate is weighted more heavily.
Depending on the speed of the drive and the CPU, it may take up to ten minutes to finish the test. The test data is updated as soon as each task is completed. A status bar marks the progress of the test. You can click on the Red button to stop and exit from a test in progress. It may take a few seconds before the test is cancelled. Depending on the display option you selected, the final result can be in the form of a bar chart, line graph or formatted text.
Bar graph - Draws a bar graph comparing your drive with your choice of a comparison drive.
Line graph - Draws a line graph comparing your drive with your choice of a comparison drive.
Raw data -- Displays the numerical figures rather than representing the information graphically.
Scan
Drive Genius Scan is another ex-Disk Guardian feature designed to verify that every sector block on your volume or drive can be read correctly. It is recommended to run this test if you notice abnormal sound emitting from the drive, or the Finder reports some of the files cannot be copied.
The time required for a Scan test is dependent on the drive's capacity and rotational speed. The blocks are read in sequential order and the operation is performed on all blocks. Drive Genius will not remove bad blocks � you may need to reformat the drive with Drive Utility that comes with Mac OS.
Initialize
Drive Genius's Initialize feature will:
• Install the Apple driver
• Write a partition map
• Create a new volume and mount it to the desktop
If you are initializing your boot drive or you only have a single drive connected to your system, you will need to boot the system from the Drive Genius CD.
Repartition
Last spring, when I wanted to upgrade my operating system to OS 10.4 Tiger I faced a conundrum with my G3 iBook, whose 20 gigabyte hard drive is partitioned into three volumes. Even running OS 10.3, I was getting crowded out of the largest partition, and Tiger was even more demanding of hard drive space.
One solution would have been to back up the entire hard drive, erase, reinitialize, and repartition it with a larger boot volume partition. That seemed like a lot of work. I keep the drive backed up, and indeed virtually mirrored on my PowerBook's hard drive, but it's reorganizing after a file restoration, to say nothing of a major system software upgrade, that burns up copious amounts of time which I didn't have to spare. If Drive Genius could successfully shrink in my hard drive's central partition and expand the main boot partition, it would be a tremendous convenience.
The ability to repartition a hard drive without erasing and reinitializing it is a function that was not available in either Norton SystemWorks or Disk Guardian. However, Drive Genius incorporates the capability of SubRosaSoft's VolumeWorks repartitioning application in its comprehensive package of features.
Drive Genius Repartition enables you to resize and manage partitions (volumes) on your hard drives, allowing you to expand or shrink partitions without erasing them. You can use the Repartition feature to create and delete partitions. Drive Genius also includes custom icons that can be automatically applied to your newly created partition. The Repartition feature can hide partitions from users as well, and has the ability to shift a partition on the hard drive in addition to reconstructing partition maps.
Partitions can be moved forwards and backwards on the hard disk allowing you to combine free spaces into one. When you shift a partition, the partition's data is unaffected.
There are four key areas in the main window:
Partition List - the list on the left hand side of the screen shows all the partitions on the currently selected hard drive. The partition list will also show hidden partitions and partitions with file systems not supported by the OS.
Drive Name and Icon - the upper right hand corner indicates the name of the drive, the drive's icon and the total size of the drive.
Context-sensitive help - provides help and descriptions of the current active screen and the icon buttons.
The iBook's 20 gigabyte IBM hard drive was back in 2003 divided into virtual volumes of 11, 3, and 5 gigabytes respectively, with another 900k or so occupied by the drive formatting. I figured I could shrink the middle partition down to one gigabyte and thus give myself a couple of gigs more breathing space on the OS X volume.
The first step was to defragment the 3 GB partition so that its contents would be all be tidily clumped together.
Once the volume integrity is successfully verified, the defrag process begins.
The screen shows the fragmentation of the volume:
• The yellow portion represents the data has already been defragmented.
• The lavender portion represents file that hasn't been moved yet.
• The black portion represents the free space.
Drive Genius gives you a running readout of what is happening as the defragmentation proceeds. It is not a quick process. In this case it took about half an hour.
For repartitioning. there are four key areas in the main window:
Partition List - the list on the left hand side of the screen shows all the partitions on the currently selected hard drive. The partition list will also show hidden partitions and partitions with file systems not supported by the OS.
Drive Name and Icon - the upper right hand corner indicates the name of the drive, the drive's icon and the total size of the drive.
Context-sensitive help - provides help and descriptions of the current active screen and the icon buttons.
Once you select the volume or partition to work on, you can select the task you want to perform by clicking on one of the icon buttons on the toolbar at the bottom of the window. For operations such as adding, resizing, and shifting partitions, you will need to enter additional information pertain to the operation. Click the Reset, Delete, Hide, and Resize to select the appropriate function.
For example, to resize a partition, which is what I wanted to do on my iBook, you click the Resize button and use the slider in the dialog that appears to select the desired new size of your partition and press Start to continue. You can also type in the new size of the partition.
To expand a volume, select the hard drive you want to work on, click on the Resize icon button, and use the slider to select the new size of your partition and click Start to continue. You need to have free space below the volume you want to expand. You can't expand a volume if there is no free space adjacent to it. If the free space partition is on top of the volume you want to expand, you will need to use the Shift function to move the volume up before expanding the volume.
With the partition defragged, I was able to use Drive Genius's resize function to shrink the middle volume down to one gigabyte, which left a new free space of two gigabytes. However, the opened up space was positioned beneath the newly resized partition, and I wanted to expand the topmost partition.
Drive Genius's "Shift" function facilitates moving partitions in relation to one another, and I used it to move the free space on top of the shrunken one gigabyte partition.
Finally, I used the Resize dialog slider to expand the top partition into the newly opened up free space below it, thus enlarging it to 13 GB, which hopefully will compensate for the extra bulk of Tiger and a bit more besides.
The entire operation went smoothly, and I encountered no problems. You have to boot from a different volume in order to do these sort of tasks with either Drive Genius or VolumeWorks. Both applications come on bootable CDs, but I detest booting up from CDs, and instead installed Drive Genius on my external FireWire hard drive, which has a bootable OS 10.3.4 system on it, and booted from that. It worked perfectly.
Since I had moved all of the files on two partitions, I decided it would be wise to run Disk Warrior and check for directory damage. Sure enough, Disk Warrior found some problems on the OS X partition, but they were easily repaired. As a bonus, I noticed that Panther seems to start up much more quickly than I had been accustomed to.
One final note; Repartition is designed to work with OS X partitions. Using it on OS 9 volume may remove the ability to start up OS 9 from that partition, assumedly because the OS 9 disk drivers may be eliminated in the process. It does not affect the data on OS 9 volumes. I can, however, still boot from the OS 9 System Folder on my third partition.
It has now being about six months since I repartitioned the drive using Drive Genius, and there have been no problems at all noticed. Tiger now has sufficient breathing space, and I would rate the operation as a 100 percent success.
Drive Genius's main competitors are Symantec's Norton Utilities (which is as noted above, no longer being developed and unsupported beyond OS 10.3.), Micromat's TechTool 4, and Drive 10, and Alsoft's DiskWarrior.
Among these applications, only Drive Genius supports: Resize volume -- on the fly (no reformatting); Shift/shift volume -- on the fly (no reformatting); Add/Delete a volume; Reset a hardware copy device; Hide/Reveal a volume; Device Cloning (100% identical to original); Clone Windows/Tivo/Linux drives; Device/Volume backup to image; Bad block recovery/cloning; Fault tolerant backup; Initialize Drive; and OSX partitioning for block devices.
In summary, Drive Genius is an impressive application with an amazingly comprehensive range of functionality. It's definitely something you'll be glad to have around when your hard drive needs either first aid or intensive care, and will also make drive management more convenient with many more alternatives and options. Being as it's competitively priced with competing applications, it offers excellent value.
Drive Genius isn't perfect. For instance, I would be much happier if it could verify and attempt to repair the disk you're booted from the way Disk Guardian could, but overall it's a nice piece of work, and well capable of filling the role in the Mac OS world vacated by Norton Utilities/SystamWorks.
Minimum System Requirements
Drive Genius requires a system with a G3 processor or higher that is capable of running Mac OS X 10.2 or above.
Drive Genius sells for $99.00. Customers who purchased Disk Guardian prior to November 1 2004 can upgrade to Drive Genius for a special upgrade price of US$49.00 (US$10 to purchase on CD media).
For more information, visit:
http://www.prosofteng.com
and
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius_info.php
Charles W. Moore
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