Provides: Maintenance, management and optimization of your hard drive

Format: Download or CD

Developer: Prosoft Engineering, Inc.

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9, Intel or PowerPC based Macintosh

Retail Price: $99.00 ($10.00 upgrade from v1)

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 1.5.1

The word "genius" is bandied about a bit too much these days, if you ask me, while words such as "bandy" go largely unnoticed. For instance, I enjoy nothing more than when a rock musician or a comedian is called a genius. It's rock music, people. It's comedy. It's not nuclear physics. There's a reason they don't give out Nobel Prizes in stand up. No matter how quick you think Robin Williams may be, he's not a genius, he's just somewhat amusing. I don't care how many instruments Prince plays, he's not a genius, he's just a guy who had a lot of time to practice.

And no matter how many functions ProSoft packs into their disk utility software, it's not a Drive "Genius." It's useful, certainly, and it has the ability to save the day for many of those experiencing drive problems (or, more importantly, to prevent drive problems), but it's missing capabilities it should include, and there are some functions it doesn't perform quite as well as competing stand-alone programs. That's not to say I'm down on Drive Genius. It does a lot of good, offering a slew of utilities divided into three distinct categories: maintenance, management and optimization.

The maintenance tools will be of the largest necessity to most, as this is where you get help with Macs that aren't performing as they should. Here, you can repair OS X volume corruption, rebuild your OS X volume structure, fix permissions, and more. Of course, not all of these utilities can be run from the boot disk. You'll need to boot up from a secondary drive or from the CD to verify, repair or rebuild a hard disk, but Drive Genius does ship on a dual-boot CD for both PowerPC and Mac Intel computers.

There are two questions you'll want to ask yourself here. First, how fast are these tools? Second, how effective are they? The boot speed was about as awful as those familiar with the old Norton SystemWorks would expect: it took nearly 15 minutes to boot from CD on a 1.8GHz G5 iMac. 15 minutes! The tasks themselves, however, performed at a more decent clip; not so slow that you're afraid to run it, but not so fast that you get the feeling it's not actually doing anything. Also, unlike with the old SystemWorks, you don't need to babysit the repairs. Drive Genius will do its thing, then let you know when it's done. Of course, you should stick around anyway in case there are troubles with the repair. The first time I tried to repair the G5 iMac, Drive Genius quit halfway through when encountering a problem it couldn't fix. I rebuilt the volume, then ran the repair successfully. Thankfully, you don't need to reboot between tasks, as that could triple the amount of time it takes to rebuild, repair and defrag your hard drive.

Drive Genius did a great job of keeping my machine running well. I didn't find it as effective as Disk Warrior for rebuilding volumes (a problem on an old PowerPC iMac remained after running Drive Genius, but was fixed after running Disk Warrior), but Drive Genius compensates by doing much more than Disk Warrior tries to do.

Although the maintenance tools are the main reason most people buy disk utilities, I find myself using the optimization tools more frequently, if only for the defragmentation capabilities. I understand that some still shy away from this because of early problems when defragging Mac OS X, but I tried Drive Genius on three different Macs, and I never once had a problem. Defragging your hard drive every few months (depending upon how often you add/delete files and install/uninstall programs) can help keep your hard drive running efficiently and help to fend off problems. Drive Genius also offers the option to run surface scans to verify your drive's reliability, and you can run a benchtest to see how all of this has helped. I didn't find this all that useful, however; whether my drive was running on par with common set-ups or running behind, I was still limited to Drive Genius' programs to speed it up. Plus, as is indicated in the screen capture below, the benchmarks are fairly outdated. Expert users can take advantage of the Sector Editor that allows for direct byte editing of all data on the drive, but I didn't give this a try.

And finally, Drive Genius offers some management tools, most of which are already covered in Mac OS X. You can use the program to partition your hard drive, just as you can with the Mac OS Disk Utility, but Drive Genius also allows you to resize and shift volumes on-the-fly. Also doubling Disk Utility, Drive Genius gives you the ability to initialize drive, which is mainly of use when formatting additional hard drives; obviously, you're going to want to install Mac OS X on your main hard drive, so you may as well let that install hand your initialization.

One final feature that seems tacked on at random but can be handy to have is the ability to shred your documents with DoD compliant (5220.22-m) secure erase. If you have need for this, it's a welcome addition. If not...well, there are other utilities I'd like to see here. I suppose it's too much to ask for Prosoft to roll Data Rescue II and/or Data Backup into this utility (although those two would make a fine single package, and similar features are offered as part of Micromat's Tech Tool Pro 4), but some sort of unerase would be quite welcome, as we used to see in SystemWorks. Instead, you need to turn to programs such as SubRosaSoft's FileSalvage for that, which is unfortunate.

You can find programs that offer individually the capabilities of Drive Genius, and some that handle them better, but not many that give you such a tight package for one relatively low price. For some, Drive Genius will be an emergency surgeon. For others, a family practitioner. But no matter how you use it or how urgent the need, Drive Genius is good to have around. The software doesn't live up to its name, and some of its features could be replaced for more useful ones, but you won't care about that when it saves your hard drive/files and gets your computer running again. Sometimes, that's genius enough.

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