6565

Provides: Management, repair, and maintenance of your hard drives

Format: DVD

Developer: Prosoft Engineering

Minimum Requirements: PowerPC or Intel, Mac OS X v10.4.9, DVD drive or separate bootable drive

Processor Compatibility: Universal

Retail Price: $99

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 2.0.3

As much as we'd like to think our car, our house, and our computers never need any kind of care or maintenance, that simply is not true. The sad truth is all three of the items listed above, and even our bodies, need some kind of maintenance and repair. Deal with it, it's true. Drive Genius can help with that support, and Prosoft has done a good job of making it fairly painless to use. While some operations may take a long long time to process, others are quick. What's the value? A computer that wont let you down just as a project is due, a paper is almost done, or just when you go to show a PC friend "Hey, check out how great my Mac is..." Despite the fact that Drive Genius can provide a variety of support for your Mac, the full value of Drive Genius is disappointing due to limitations in the software's functionality and poor documentation.

Drive Genius is a bit different from most other maintenance/repair software. While most other programs can function off of a different partition, Drive Genius has to be on a different drive. Let me explain: most repair/maintenance programs cannot do their processing on the same OS that is in operation. This is no different from a doctor not being able to perform brain surgery on him/herself. However, the dynamics that Drive Genius plays on is not the doctor, but the hospital itself. That is, Drive Genius is working on the OS and the whole hard drive. Thus, you have to effectively be running Drive Genius from a different hospital, or in this case a different drive.

[Nomenclature for this review: a hard drive can also be referred to as a drive. A volume can also be referred to as a partition. Where it gets confusing is that if you take a hard drive and partition it into two volumes, the two volumes will show up on the Mac desktop as two drives.]

If you open Apple's Disk Utility and try to do a repair on your hard drive, you will see that you can repair the Permissions and verify the drive's quality, but you cannot repair the drive. On the other hand, if you take any hard drive, you can partition it into smaller sections, each of which can contain its own OS and software. If you place a complete OS and Apple's Disk Utility, on each partition you can run Disk Utility's Repair operation on each other's partition. However, if you place Drive Genius on each partition, you cannot do work on the hard drive because each partition is a resident of that same hard drive. Because of this limitation, plan on running Drive Genius off of the DVD or off of a separate, bootable hard drive. So,generally, you will need to put the DVD into your computer, restart and press the "c" key to start with the DVD. Warning, this will take more time than you are used to because reading data is much slower off of a CD or DVD than from a hard drive.

The work window of Drive Genius is more pleasant looking than efficiently functional. There are eleven different functions of Drive Genius, but only half are visible at a time. When you first open Drive Genius, you see only six icons of the eleven components, and as you hover your mouse over the top half of any icon, the function of that component is displayed above the icon. In a sheet hanging from below the window is a summary of what that component does. As you continue to pause your mouse over the icon, the view slowly zooms toward the icon so it becomes the primary item visible. The nifty visuals are cute but neither help nor hurt the functionality of the program.

The first six operations you see are shown below.

This set has (in order from left to right)

• Information - Provides information on all of the drives or volumes connected to your system. This operation is not limited by which volume the program is on.
• Defragmentation - Defragments the selected partition, and Drive Genius must be on a different drive to run.
• Benchtest - Runs performance tests on any Drives attached to your computer. This must on a different drive to run.)
• Repair - Involves four different possible operations: Permission Repair, Verify, Repair, and Rebuild. These can be done from different partitions as opposed to different drives.)
• Integrity Check - Checks the integrity of various parameters such as read and write. It must be on a different drive.
• Scan - This looks for block errors on your hard drive. If any are found, Drive Genius works with the hard drive to block out those sectors so they are not used. This must on a different drive to run.

Notice that on the far right is a green arrow pointing to the right. If you click on this arrow, the screen pivots as if you rotated to the right, and you see the last five components shown below. [As an aside, the green arrow I believe is done as a semi-transparent 3-dimensional drawing that makes it look very blurry/fuzzy, and I found it annoying to look at.]

The last five operations are (in order from left to right, ignoring the orange return arrow):

• Initialize - This can erase a drive, and lets you format the drive as desired.
• Repartition - This lets you partition, repartition, and resize a partition on the fly without having to erase a drive.
• Duplicate - This lets you duplicate the content of a drive to another drive or a disk image file.
• Shred - This provides a complete erasing of a drive so that its former contents are no longer available.)
• Sector Edit - This is perhaps the most dangerous tool in the hands of the non-educated. Here, you can work on the content of anything in your drive at the sector level.

For me, the most curious dynamic of Drive Genius is the layout. In the (mostly okay) 100 page manual (pdf), the functions of Drive Genius are broken down into three categories, the focus of which is as follows:

• Maintenance and Management
  • Repair
  • Defragment
  • Duplicate
  • Sector Edit
  • Shredder
• Testing and Reporting
  • Integrity check
  • Benchtest
  • Scan
  • Information
• Device Management
  • Initialize
  • Repartition

As you look at the locations of these various functions, you will see that you have to zip back and forth from the first tier to the 2nd tier to follow any progression and/or to stay in the same group. Even with their three categories, you have to move back and forth to access functions. One specific example of the problems with their layout is if you want to do any operation on the partitions of your drive, you must first Defragment before performing any Repartition operation. At a minimum, it would have made more sense to place all of the operative functions on one tier and the non-operative functions on the second tier. That is, Initialize, Repair, Defragment, Repartition, Duplicate, Shredder on the first tier, and Information, Scan, Benchtest, Integrity Check, and Sector Edit on the second tier. [Note: I'm placing Sector Edit on the second tier because it really should not be used by anyone doing general maintenance or repair on a drive, so I'm burying it as well as I can.] In addition, I would not have made two pages of functions, but rather two rows of icons on one page.

But, what can I say? They never asked me...

Probably the best and most useful two functions of Drive Genius are Defragment and Repartition. The Mac OS does a certain amount of defragmenting on its own, but is limited to smaller files. You can read about how Apple feels about defragmenting here. However, despite what Apple says, after running a full defragmentation on my drive, I did find both startup and generally the running of the drive "snappier." I do not have any quantitative information on this, only qualitative.

When you click on any of the function icons within Drive Genius, the view changes to what's seen below after I have selected which volume I wish to perform the action on. (At this point, the window's dynamics work similar to Apple's System Preferences where the left and right arrows take you to other tasks, and the "Show All" button returns you to the layout shown in the above two images.) [The text in the dark teal region either tells you of a tools function or, as in this case, warned me that if I had selected the third drive down, Drive Genius couldn't do anything because that is a startup drive.]

The big warnings about performing a defragmentation are that you do not want to have any premature stoppage due to a power outage, as it may render the data useless. So, backing up prior to a defragment is essential. In addition, you do not want to do this just before getting some work done because the process can take an hour (if the drive is very small) to many, many hours (if the drive is large and little space is remaining). In fact, the less free space you have, the longer it will take because the free space is used to move files around. Note that the timing of this process can be extremely deceiving. The first 90% of the process will seem to take a fairly short amount of time. It's the last 10% that can seem to take forever. ProSoft does warn you that this can take a long time and that it's important to turn off any sleep settings for the duration of the process. However, what is very much needed is the option to have the computer turn itself off after the process is complete. That way you could set this up before leaving your office or before going to bed knowing that the next time you come to your computer and turn it on, the defragmentation process is complete. Currently, you need to monitor the computer, which, in this vein, is similar to watching paint dry.

So you can better see what I'm talking about in regards to the time it takes for the defragmentation process to complete, below is a graph displaying the results. The X axis is time (in seconds), the Y axis is percent (%) completion. As you can see, it goes fairly quickly until about 90% is done, then you need to settle back with a good book.

Unknown in the defragmenting process is if any logic or order is taking place as to where the files are being placed. For example, some defragmenting programs state that they place all OS code in the part of the disk where it can easily be read so that OS operations are quick to access. In Drive Genius there is one option/selection—Defragment—which I suppose is good if you do not like making decisions.

Repartition is also an excellent function. Normally, the first thing I do when purchasing a computer is to erase the hard drive and create two partitions: one small and one large. I replace the operating system on both, but on the small partition I only place all of my repair/maintenance programs so that when I need to do some repair/maintenance on my main partition all I have to do is to restart on the small partition, work on the main partition, and then restart on the main partition to continue on my way. This involves having to replace the OS and all starting programs on both of the new partitions. For the most part, the first two to three hours of any new computer I get is taken up with partitioning and installing the OS. It's the price I pay for easier maintenance later on. However, when I get my next computer, I expect to do the partitioning and Duplication of the OS all at the get-go right from Drive Genius. This should save me at least a couple of hours of time.

Earlier, I mentioned the Duplicate function has a primary potential use besides placing the OS on a second partition, and that is for a complete back up. As some of you probably know, you cannot get a viable duplication of a drive by simply dragging what you see from one drive to another. The reason for this is that the Mac OS has many files and folders that are rendered invisible by the OS that you cannot drag. However, without those files and folders, the resulting copy is useless. Duplication gets everything. Unfortunately you cannot select which items (files or folders) to duplicate, as this function is an "all or nothing" type of operation.

Without a doubt, the most useless of the Drive Genius' functions are the Integrity check and the Benchtest. Not that they do not perform adequately nor that they provide wrong data. But rather, neither the program nor the manual provide any context to understand the results. Consider the results provided below. It is a bar graph showing the results of a Sustained Write of 1 MB of data over a one minute test. So now that I have these results, what is the significance of the red and blue bars, what constitutes the reason why a bar is red, blue, or green? But perhaps most important of all, what is the significance of the results and what you (the user) should be concerned and/or do about the results are never ever explained.

No matter how valuable, well executed, and/or presented are the results, information without content and context becomes irrelevant. I might as well say that today's sport scores are 10-2, 3-7, and 0-0. Your need to know what teams, what sports, and who played are not really very important.

The Repair functions mostly seem to duplicate the functionality of Apple's Disk Utility. The one additional function not dealt with at all by Apple's Disk Utility is the Rebuild sub-function which rebuilds the Directory. I do not know any specifics of how this differs in level of quality as compared to, say, Alsoft's DiskWarrior, except for the time it took to perform its functions were significantly less than the time that DiskWarrior takes. I do know that DiskWarrior reads the hard drive for the data, creates a new directory, verifies the data, itemizes any differences between the new and old directory, replaces your directory, and, after verification (and acceptance by the user), removes your old directory and installs the new one. However, I do not know if Drive Genius does the level of processing, nor do I know if it repairs the directory or rebuilds it.

Shred, like many of the Drive Genius' functions are drive related only and cannot be run from a volume. If you are getting rid of a computer and wish to guarantee that the data will remain GONE!, Shred's for you. If however, you wish to get rid of an incriminating specific file, you are best to use Apple's own "Secure Empty Trash," (I am not aware of how safe that fully is). Shred does have four levels of security: 1 pass (random), 3 pass (random), 7 pass (good enough for the DoD), and the Gutmann 35 pass.

Initialize is not really any better than Apple's Disk Utility, and in several ways is not as good. For one thing, there is no option to give the resultant drive a name, and it will be given the default name of "DriveGenius" after the initialization. In addition, there are only two options for the formatting of the initialized drive: Apple Partition Map and GUID Partition Table. The latter is good if you need to share drives with PCs but only if they have a new OS. Apple's Disk Utility will Initialize a drive to be viable with older PC OSs, and you also have the choice as to whether the drive will be journaled (the default is journaled) and whether it will be case sensitive.

One surprising missed opportunity of Drive Genius is that it cannot turn on the SMART functionality present in many drives, nor direct how any message from a SMART drive will be sent.

With the exception of the Defragmenting and Repartition functions of Drive Genius 2, there is not much there there. Those two are worth the price of admission if you need that capability. The Shredder tool is outstanding for cleaning your data off of old hard drives prior to disposal, selling, or giving away, and provides a wonderful sense of security in this day of digital exposure.

Three of the Repair functions are mirrored by Apple's Disk Utility, and the forth is done by DiskWarrior. [Note: since I do not know the internal dynamics of how either program rebuilds the directory, I cannot, in all fairness claim that either is better, worse, or are the same.] The diagnostic tools might be great, but fail completely because they do not provide any information from which to understand and use any data the program collects and presents. The Initialize tool also shares functionality with Disk Utility but is limited by fewer features.

Overall, this package is okay. Drive Genius' best features are those you need fairly irregularly, but, when you do, boy it is good to have them. However, it is hard to give this program a higher rating considering that so much of the program isn't helpful, a duplicate of what you get from Apple for free, and/or is fairly limited. The reality is that when you purchase a program, you are purchasing the whole program; in this case, the whole program is underwhelming. However, if the value of the Defragmentation, Repartitioning, and Scrubbing are sufficient to you, than I can certainly recommend this program.

Applelinks Rating

Buy Drive Genius 2

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.

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