Drive Genius 2

Other products by ProSoft Engineering

Product Features

• Sold Individually
• Directory repair, repartition on-the-fly, device/volume cloning, integrity testing, benchmarking, secure erase and several other tools to help maintain your hard drive
• Your hard drive should be defragged every 2 months or so. If you are working with smaller files (Microsoft Office, emails) you should run defrag every 3 to 4 months
• OS X only optimizes files under 20MB. It also only optimizes the files not the drive, so even though the smaller files are optimized there can be empty space in between the files themselves. Drive Genius 2 has the ability to optimize the drive, by putting all pieces of the file together
• Able to repartition your hard drive 'on-the-fly' (no need to reformat the hard drive) allowing you to add, delete, hide or expand partitions live.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001329LRW
• Item model number: 52100
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 23, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #336 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

Product Description

The Drive Genius 2 is built upon the same award-winning foundation of the original Drive Genius. Improvements have been made to speed and overall performance in the new version. One of the most noticeable and eye catching changes is the all-new user interface. Drive Genius 2 makes hard maintenance tasks painless, fast and easy.Traditionally, hard drive maintenance and management has been difficult, time-consuming and confusing. In many cases people skip these critical activities - sometimes leading to disaster. Thankfully, Drive Genius 2 makes these tedious tasks painless, fast and easy. Product Description: Drive Genius ( v. 2 ) - complete package Category: Utilities Subcategory: Utilities - hardware & software optimizing Version: 2 License Type: Complete package License Qty: 1 user License Pricing: Standard Platform: MacOS Distribution Media: DVD-ROM Package Type: Retail OS Required: Apple MacOS X 10.4.9 or later

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works exactly as it should!, August 30, 2008

By	Michele Monroe (Franklin, TN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I received this product yesterday and the version shipped was 2.0.3. I used it on my 1-year old MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.5.4. I had no problems running any of the utilities or booting from the disc. It defragged my drive beautifully (I was honestly surprised at how fragged it was), repaired my permissions, and checked for bad sectors on my hard drive (none - woo hoo!).

For those of you who purchased Drive Genius 2 that is not version 2.0.3, go to Prosoft's website and you can download the latest update for free, as well as get a free bootable disk, if needed. I think a lot of the people who left bad reviews never came back and updated them because the software does automatically check for updates and 2.0.3 was released in June 2008.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drive Genius 2 A Great Tool, May 8, 2008

By	Carlene Brown (Anchorage, Alaska) - See all my reviews

My PowerBook G4 has been a very dependable laptop. It has never given me any problems. However, it is four years old, has a limited hard drive capacity, 60 GB, and is slow compared to the new Apple models. After installing Leopard it started taking a long time to boot and was running slow with some programs having a hard time just opening. When I started seeing more and more spinning beach balls I knew it was time to do something.

That something was to run it through a utility program, which found some problems but was unable to correct them as I didn't have enough contiguous space to save even a 200 MB file, and though the program could tell me what was wrong it could not fix it.

What to do? I have two utility programs that I run regularly to keep up with the maintenance of my computers but obviously neither program was doing the defragmenting that was needed.

While searching the internet for a solution I discovered Drive Genius 2 by Prosoft Engineering. Drive Genius 2 is designed for Mac OS X and is the disk utility Apple uses at their Genius Bar to defrag your drive. (Part of the ProCare program offered by Apple.)

Drive Genius 2 contains a collection of tools to maintain, manage and optimize your hard drive. Here are a few of the things Drive Genius 2 can do.

* Analyze, Repair and Rebuild OS X directory information.
* Defragment OS X drives for optimum performance.
* Create high-speed backup clones of most devices.
* Securely erase drives.
* Add, delete or resize partitions without reformatting.
* Long range throughput tests for performance and diagnostics.
* Benchtests for comparing drive performance.
* Surface scanning to test for media faults.
* Low level sector editing for the expert users.

Drive Genius 2 comes on a bootable DVD which allows you to boot from the DVD and work directly on your main hard drive. You can also install the application to work on other internal or external drives.

I began the maintenance and repair session by making a bootable backup of my hard drive just in case something went wrong. I next booted from the DVD. The Drive Genius 2 user interface consists of colorful icons that allow you to choose the specific tool you want to use including Disk Information, Defrag, Benchtest, Repair, Integrity Check and Scan. Proceeding to the next page there are more tool icons including Initialize, Repartition, Duplicate, Shred, and Sector Edit.

I chose the defragmenting tool, selected my hard drive and clicked on start. The user's manual cautions that it will take between 30 minutes and an entire day to complete this process depending on the amount of fragmentation and the speed of your processor. My laptop barely meets the minimum system requirements for this software and it took 48 hours to complete the defragging process. A graphic appears as you begin this process and shows the extent of fragmentation of the hard drive and then another appears when it is finished. Wow, what a difference, the empty spaces were in tiny bits and pieces spread throughout the drive when it began and ended with the filled and empty spaces, respectively, in tight individual sections.

I ran the other repair sequences. Some minor disk structure repairs were done. Then I rebuilt the directory, where some corrections were also made. I ran all the test and repair tools. The tests and comparisons all looked good.

The bottom line - my laptop is back to running smoothly with no more spinning beach balls
and no loss of data.

Prosoft's customer service policy includes replacing a lost DVD or sending an updated DVD for a charge of just $5.00. They also offer unlimited free pre and post technical phone or email support.

There are some tools that are too advanced for me and I will probably never use in this collection of hard disk tools but the major maintenance and repair aspects of the software are well worth the investment. Prosoft suggests using this software to maintain and optimize your hard drive on a regular basis (every two to four months) to prevent major problems. I would recommend giving Drive Genius 2 a trial. A free demo is available to download
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Drive genius to boot, July 6, 2008

By	Abram E. Katz "Word Count" (New Haven, Connecticut United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was incredulous to find that the original copy of Drive Genius 2 that I received would not boot up an Intel Mac. I contacted Prosoft and they sent me not one, but two copies of the new, improved disk, which does work on my computer. Make you get the new improved version if you have an Intel Mac.