Review Of Drive Genius 3
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Over the years, Drive Genius has earned its repute as an effective disk restore and analysis tool. This latest update adds to its standing.


Now Intel-only and capable of working as a 64-bit software, Drive Genius 3 comes in variations: one for personal use, and a dearer licence for working with the drives of others. In both cases, the program download includes a bootable DVD image, which you may must run many of the application's features - Drive Genius won't restore, defrag or duplicate your boot drive unless it's working from that disc.


Drive Genius' Good interface is an acquired taste. With its elective animated interface on, icons representing every of its features, divided between screens, zoom towards you as your mouse hovers over them. Thankfully, you can even change between features via a drop-down menu.


With a few important exceptions, the program's suite of thirteen utilities are broadly similar to those of its predecessor. Functions vary from volume repairing and rebuilding tools to a defragmenting function, and even sector enhancing of data.


Alongside assist for hardware Raids and Apple's software Raid, the big addition to Drive Genius 3 is DrivePulse, a utility that keeps tabs on the health of your hard drive. As well as checking Smart integrity, it scans drives for dangerous blocks, verifies catalog integrity and checks for volume fragmentation. DrivePulse solely runs in the background when your Mac is idle, and once we left our test machine unattended for just a few hours, it was quick to warn of fragmentation and drive integrity errors, which prompted a precautionary backup. You possibly can suppress noncritical warnings and robotically suspend checks if you're running on batteries, and shortly view status and logs from the DrivePulse Finder menu bar icon.


Our solely gripe was that we could not adjust the frequency of the scans: they're routinely scheduled to run at set intervals ranging between a day and a week. You can always trigger Drive Genius' separate Scan and Defrag capabilities to carry out related functions on demand, but these do not update DrivePulse's menu status.


Greater arduous drives, better caching and built-in Mac OS X features that limit defragmentation means defragging onerous disks is less modern than it as soon as was. However, Drive Genius 3 claims improved defragmentation and better information from its Defrag utility. It definitely appeared quicker than the same device in Drive Genius 2, but nonetheless took greater than an hour to scan an 80GB exterior drive, due to the thousands of files that are scattered across Mac OS X.


We used Drive Genius' Benchtest instrument to measure drive performance after defragging. Benchtest measures performance against numerous Mac configurations, but also lets you save your own results for comparison. On our test drive, we couldn't see enough improvement to justify the lengthy defragging process, though outcomes could vary.


Given such prolonged scans, it's at the least helpful that in the program's preferences, now you can arrange an automatic email to notify you when tasks complete, although this can't be arrange on a activity-by-task basis.


There are other handy tools: Duplicate creates a bootable clone of a disk, while Scan, which checks a disk for bad sectors and de-allocates them, has been improved to incorporate a more exhaustive separate test that checks the read/write reliability of every block. DriveSlim deletes or archives large, duplicate or unused information, and checks for unused localisations or common binaries. On our test drive, it discovered 4GB of unneeded extras in 10 minutes. With such power at your disposal, it's no surprise that Drive Genius plasters unmissable warnings about the risk of data loss earlier than you may run lots of the tests.

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