Prosoft Drive Genius (Mac)

by Global Marketing Partners

Product Features

• Partition - Organize data more efficiently
• Defragment - Speed up your OS X volumes
• Initialize - High level OS X formatting
• Shred - Securely remove all traces of data
• Preventative Maintenance -Find problems before they happen

Product Details

Product Manual [5.75mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0007MF038
• Item model number: 23100
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 24, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,270 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

Drive Genius is an OS X utility designed to provide unsurpassed hard drive management. Featuring an easy-to-use interface, Drive Genius is packed with powerful tools such as a drive optimizer, a comprehensive repair facility for analyzing, repairing and rebuilding volumes, plus excellent testing capabilities with media surface scanning, performance benchmarking and data integrity checking. It can be used to initialize drives, create and delete partitions, and securely erase the data from volumes/drives per Department of Defense standards. 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best utility software I've used, October 22, 2005

By 

mjm "rigbycorp" (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prosoft Drive Genius (Mac) (CD-ROM)

I've been a mac user for 10 years, and I've never been very impressed with Norton Utilities for Mac. They seem to treat the Apple platform as an afterthought. Although it does seem to have some useful features, especially Unerase, I don't feel it is as good as Drive Genius. In the area of defragmentation, there aren't a host of alternatives, and Drive Genius works very well. The only thing you have to be sure of is that you get version 1.1.1, because I got the previous version in the box, and with Panther or Tiger, it will not work properly. You can get the updated version from the website, but it's 102MB; so if you don't have a high-speed internet connection, you,ll grow a beard before you get the whole thing downloaded. And you must follow the directions on the website to create a bootable disc that you can use. But the program, works well, and I am very pleased, since I paid even more than what it's selling for now. The only other program I recommend besides this is DiskWarrior by Alsoft, to keep your directory optimized for best performance.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps one of the best utilities for the Mac at this time, December 7, 2005

By 

Traveler (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Prosoft Drive Genius (Mac) (CD-ROM)

Drive Genius reminds me of years ago using Micromat's Techtool before they made it so hard to use and configure. It's simple, it's elegant, and it does the job.

Drive Genius will duplicate your volume or entire drive, checks the integrity of your hardware, repairs, rebuilds and verifies volume structures, and fixes permissions. It also adds, deletes, hides, shrinks or expands partitions, shreds files (DOD compliant!), defrags your hard drive, benchtests your system, and has an sector editor for expert users. Combine this with DiskWarrior and you probably don't need another repair utility.

Forget Norton (they've stopped supporting the Mac). And MicroMat's Techtool, while valuable, is a chore to use and configure. If you want to repair your Mac this is the one you want.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive & the Replacement for Norton, March 17, 2006

By 

KC "metroxing" (Northern CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prosoft Drive Genius (Mac) (CD-ROM)

Norton is dead as most you know. It will work on 10.2 or earlier but Norton SystemWorks does not work on any Mac OS after 10.2 very well. Norton had one thing going for it - it did a nice job of repairing B-tree catalog errors and directories - when things started going wonky, if you ran Norton, it would clear things up for a while. The other features might've worked well 5 years earlier but in the end (even though they updated them to run under OSX) were of dubious value - defragmentation, file recovery etc ... especially in the end when you no longer boot from the Norton CD, it was all rather useless and in case you hadn't noticed, the Norton UNINSTALLER only runs under OS9 so if your Mac can't boot OS9 (Classic), you can't remove all those invisible files they leave scattered around.

DRIVE GENIUS looks like the best replacement for Norton. I had a drive go down - it wouldn't mount but since APPLE's DISK ULTITY could "see" the drive, the drive was fine, it was just a matter of restoring the directory. DRIVE GENIUS was the only Mac utility that could recover the directory. My only complaint would be that under REPAIR, there are submenu choices - for some odd reason REPAIR did not repair it but REBUILD did. It would seem that users like us do not really care if you rebuild or repair - as long as you can get the directory fixed so it shows up as an HDD, all is good in the world, right?

In addition, you get other features such as DEFRAGMENT, DUPLICATE, SECTOR EDIT, SHRED, INTEGRITY CHECK, BENCHTEST & SCAN. Of course, Defrag, Duplicate and Shred are pretty obvious as to what they do. Sector Edit is for advanced users - you get to look at the underlying raw hex (?) of the data on the drive so if you feel comfortable doing that. Integrity Check & Scan seems to do the same thing in checking the underlying hardware of your HDD.

DRIVE GENIUS has a pretty nice user interface and you get a constant feedback on when it's doing repairs/rebuilding. That is an EXCELLENT feature. When you are wondering if your data is still intact, you want to know what the utility is doing. And you can boot off the CD - presumably not Intel Macs as it's 10.4

It is not perfect though. For drives that Apple recognizes as drives (you get the query if you want to initialize/eject or ignore) - I was able to get the directory fixed on an IDE USB drive but not an IDE Firewire drive so if you are in the same situation, you might need to plug it in as a USB drive versus in a firewire enclosure. But since it was actually able to see and repair the USB drive, I consider that a victory of sorts plus the the interface is much more re-assuring than the interface of TechTools Pro or DiskWarrior.

TECHTOOLS PRO is now much nicer looking and now feature laden. If you have a couple Macs and quite a few HDD's as I do, you'll most likely want to get it to have it handy to do some things that DRIVE GENIUS does not do. One advanatge is that it can actually test the hardware of your Mac including memory, cache, etc ... unfortunately, it still has the same old "feature" of the old TechTools in that it launches into the test mode as soon as you click on SUITES (what they call hardware tests if choose to do them altogether). For the unintiated, this can scare the crap out of you as when it gets to the video test, your screen changes color in rapid succession (at least it's faster than before) but it's still scary and disconcerting because they do NOT tell you it's about to happen! The other main choices are TESTS, PERFORMANCE, TOOLS & SAFETY. Tests is actually the hardware test that does not scare you. You actually have to press the start button before it races off to check your mac itself. PERFORMANCE lets you optomize the drive or fix directories. TOOLS is actually a nice addition - it is broken down into multiple parts: eDRIVE which lets you create a bootable partition. Aparently you can create this partition even if you haven't physically partitioned your main HDD - frankly, I'm a little too leery of messing with this feature to try it on my main HDD but good luck if you're brave enough. You can also create a duplicate on another HDD. In addition under TOOLS, you get DATA RECOVERY, WIPE DATA, AUDIO & VIDEO testing. The last choice is SAFETY which offers under it: PROTECTION SETUP which is nice as you can back up your directory info; DIAGNOSTICS SETUP which creates an auto schedule for checking up on your Mac & HDD; SMART SETUP for auto notification when your drive is about to have problems and ALERT so it can email you.

To be honest, I had bad experiences in using TechTool's (before it went Pro) in using to fix directories. Like other people, it seemed to have ended trashing most of my files so I can't vouch for its ability to repair anything but the diagnostics and early warning setup are unique to the Mac in one package so if you are really dependent on your Mac to start up & run everyday, it's probably worth getting the diagnostics and eDrive feature - when you actually have a directory problem though, you are probably better off running DRIVE GENIUS first.

One other nice feature of TECHTOOLS PRO is you actually get a printed manual. DRIVE GENIUS is a PDF - unless you print it out, not real useful when you can't access your Mac.

The third main Mac utility in this genre is: DISKWARRIOR. It's main feature is that it has the SMART warning system also to let you know when you might experience a HDD failure. It has some rudimentary repair/rebuild feature but I ran into two main problems. It's hard to tell exactly what it's attempting to do. The progress bar doesn't move very much but the main problem is EXACTLY what you do NOT want out of a utility ... It tells you there is directory problem but it could not fix it. Not what you want when the HDD does not mount. Since it doesn't less than DRIVE GENIUS with only about 30% of its features, you should get DRIVE GENIUS first - for critical users, they might also want to get TECHTOOLS PRO and of course, for those who have mission critical apps they must get to - it doesn't hurt to have DISKWARRIOR around.