Drive Genius
Prosoft Engineering (www.prosofteng.com) - $99 Retail

As its name suggests, Drive Genius's specialty is to maintain and manage your hard drive (or multiple hard drives).

The hard drive is the container for everything your computer uses to think. It contains your operating system, your applications (programs), and the files that you create. This makes the health of your hard drive an extremely high priority. Remember, if your whole computer fails, you can still take the information from the hard drive (or the drive, itself), and use it in another computer. However, if your hard drive fails, it's very likely you're your data can be lost — sometimes irretrievably. Your hard drive is among the very few actual "moving parts" in your computer. It is also constantly in action, either allowing you to read data, or writing new data to different areas of the drive. As such, it is highly prone to corruption, to wear and tear, and to eventual failure. One way to think about the issue may be:

"In life, there are 3 things that are certain: death, taxes, and hard drive failure."

With this in mind, we must feel confident that the utility we use to maintain the health of our hard drive is trustworthy and reliable. As my experience suggests, Drive Genius offers this level of confidence.

Maintenance
Drive Genius's maintenance tools will allow you to perform everything from superficial to extremely detailed maintenance and support of your drive. Its Duplicate feature uses a technology that allows for extremely fast, exact copy duplication of a drive or volume. For testing and maintenance, the user has the flexibility of using a range of tools that perform routines ranging from swift, basic operations to deeper, highly detailed operations that can take up to several days to complete. Drive Genius gives the user the ability to test a drive's Integrity, as well as Repair and Rebuild corrupted areas of the drive. It can also use the SMART status diagnostic codes, in drives that are equipped for that functionality.

Many of my clients have encountered a situation that I have called "computer Alzheimer's". It occurs when we know the hard drive still contains the information that's embedded on it, but it no longer remembers how to access this information. Regular usage of Drive Genius can serve to prevent this incident, and Drive Genius also has the facility to perform repair on the underlying cause of this problem. In this way, its abilities are similar to those of Alsoft's DiskWarrior. In my consultancy, I have had the opportunity to attempt such repairs with both products, and have had positive and negative results with both. As I've been using DiskWarrior for this feature, for a much longer time, I'm inclined to recommend it for this specific problem. However, it's important to note that DiskWarrior is a "one trick pony", designed specifically to address this issue, whereas Drive Genius can perform a great many further functions.

One of the features I like best for my clients is the ability to Fix Disk Permissions, directly from within the program. As all of my client's know, I'm a stickler for performing this basic maintenance routine. However, one thing the vast majority of my clients seem to have in common, is that when I ask "when was the last time you repaired your disk permissions", I'm told "the last time you were here". Perhaps the inclusion of this function in a broader based product may provide incentive for my clients to perform this action more regularly.

Management
Drive Genius also includes a very powerful set of Drive Management tools. Along with the ability to create in-depth reports of your drive specifications, it includes the ability to Initialize a drive (AKA: reformatting). However, it allows this function to go a step further than most other utilities. Normal initialization will allow the user to see the drive as empty, however, it does that by deleting the drives basic database that tells the drive how to find the data – but, it leaves that data on the drive. This leaves your data essentially retrievable. Drive Genius allows the user to completely remove all traces of data from your drive, using DoD compliant algorithms.

In my opinion, the most powerful feature of Drive Genius is its ability to Partition and Re-Partition a drive. Partitioning is the organization of a single drive into multiple volumes (essentially, causing the computer and user to see a single drive as more than one drive). In the past, partitioning was only available when first initializing the drive. If one decided that he wanted to add, delete, or change a partition, the entire drive directory had to be erased, making that drive's data completely unusable. Drive Genius provides the ability to Add, Delete, Hide, Expand, or shrink OSX partitions on the fly – without having to erase the drive! I believe that this feature, alone, is "worth the price of admission".

Optimization
Drive Genius's Optimization tools are those that may be used the least, by the majority of my clients. It includes the ability to perform Benchtesting (testing the speed of the drive, in relation to common computer configurations), Surface Scanning (the ability to test individual drive sectors for read/write capability), and Sector Editing (a highly advanced feature – for experts only). One of the Optimizing features that may be used by my clientele is the Defragment utility. The idea of defragmentation is to move data among sectors of the hard drive, in order to create the largest available areas of contiguous free space. According to Apple, this function is rarely very necessary, with consideration of today's very large hard drives, and the power of OSX (see this article in the Apple Knowledge Base), but for those of you who are in the video and audio editing field, this function may serve to provide an overall speed boost, when using drives that are becoming full. It's important to note that Disk Optimization can take many hours, but it will run in the background, as long as the target drive is not being used.

Items to Note
Now that you have an overview of the essential functions of Drive Genius, there are a few important points to note:

• Drive Genius will not perform repairs on your boot drive, however, it will perform all functions on any other volumes mounted on the computer. If you wish to use Drive Genius to maintain your primary boot drive (highly recommended), you will need to boot directly from the CD (version 1.1.5 includes Tiger bootability), by holding down the "C" key during the computer's startup process. I did feel that this slowed the software's operations down. I understand that it is certainly necessary, during the Re-Partitioning and Optimization processes, but I'd prefer to be able to perform the essential maintenance test, directly from my hard drive.
• The need to boot from the CD also necessitates a keyboard and mouse that's directly attached to the USB port on your computer. Those of you with Bluetooth keyboards and mice, or Wacom tablets will need access to standard accessories to use this software.
• Drive Genius is performing some very complex functions on your hard drives. It is IMPERATIVE that you perform and maintain a reliable backup of your data, PRIOR to running Drive Genius on your computer. This is an issue I cannot stress strongly enough... BACK UP!
• Drive Genius does not include automated functionality. It cannot be scheduled to run, unattended. In order for Drive Genius to be effective, the user must remember to run the program on a regular basis.
• Never use a utility that was created for an earlier version of the operating system than that which you are running. If you require the use of any utility, check the manufacturer's website for updates and compatibility information (those of you who have used older versions of Norton Utilities on their Panther or Tiger installations can attest to the damage this can cause).
• Drive Genius, while being a great product, is only built to maintain and repair the functionality of your hard drive. A full maintenance "arsenal" should include software that will also address OS functionality and health, a backup solution, and software that will fulfill each user's individual requirements. The use of Drive Genius is not a perfect solution, but more of a matter of the "apple a day", that "keeps the doctor away".

Drive Genius is still relatively new to the Utilities arena. This has resulted in my inability to have given it as thorough a "workout" as some of the other utilities I've been using for some time. However, I have found that the broad range of functionality built into this program, and the reliability I have been able to witness, makes Drive Genius one of the utilities I recommend for my clients.