Drive Genius: Smarter Than Your Average Disk Utility

Hard drives are becoming bigger and bigger all the time, so that we may keep more and more valuable information on them. Not only our work, and sometimes our livelihood, but also our memories go in these humongous shoe boxes, and, unlike our shoe boxes that are safe under the bed, our hard drives are vulnerable to a number of different things that can render them inoperable. For this reason, drive diagnosis and repair tools have always been with us.

Apple gives us Disk Utility to take care of our needs, but the tool, although great for the casual user or the computer greenhorn, lacks many advanced, or should I say power-user features. There are other tools out there that rise up to meet the challenge, and Drive Genius is one of them.

Although relatively new on the scene, the professional-grade Drive Genius has made a big entrance with many features and tools that provide everything you could possibly need to diagnose and repair any hard drive problems that may be encountered during the usage of the computer in a normal working environment.

Repair
The repair tool is a mimic of Disc Utility. You can scan the volume for errors, using Verify; Check the volume for errors and then attempt to repair them once they are found using Repair, and repeat this process until the scanning turns up no more errors; Repair Permissions in order to resolve any problems by setting them to Apple specifications; and, as a feature that is not available in Disk Utility, you can Rebuild the drive. Rebuilding attempts to fix problems that the Repair tools cannot by rebuilding the portion of the drive (known as the Catalog B-Tree) which contains information pertaining to the location of all of the files on the volume.

Defragment
Although OS X, like other advanced operating systems, performs defragmentation on the fly, whenever you open or save your files, those who work a lot with video capture and other huge uncompressed formats will in time cause a significant amount of fragmentation to the drive. If that happens, this utility is your friend. Unlike some of the other defragment programs out there, Drive Genius isn't very prone to crashing, and does the job much faster.

Duplicate
This is one of the better tools this program has to offer. It allows the duplication of a volume, bit-by-bit (either skipping free space or not) in order to make an exact copy of a volume. This can be used to back up critical volumes, either for routine safety or before attempting risky repairs. It can even create a duplicate start up drive... exact copy.

Sector Edit
This is a very advanced feature that allows the editing of the raw hex data that makes up an entire volume. Needless to say, this is a very dangerous feature if you don't know what you are doing, even the smallest mistake and you risk loosing the entire volume. It is highly recommended that you stay away from this and only go near after you use the above mentioned Duplicate tool to make a backup copy.

Shred
With this tool you can remove your data the hard way, ensuring that it cannot be recovered or read by anyone. To do this it overwrites everything on your hard drive with gibberish, using an overwrite standard more rigorous than what the Pentagon demands. In case you don't want to shred the entire drive you can choose to shred only the available free space. This is a very similar feature to 'the Secure Empty Trash' command found in the latest versions of OS X.

Integrity Check
This tool will run a battery of tests which consist in either reading or writing a certain chunk of information over and over again. The speed of the reading or writing is displayed in a graph and at the end of the test you can clearly see an average read or write speed, any result that is different from that average is a potential fault in the drive and should be further investigated. This tool is not to be ignored on account of a drive's internal SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) diagnostic routines.

Scan
This tool will verify that every sector (block which can contain information) on your volume or drive is in working order and can be both read and written. Basically this tool will identify those bad sectors you might remember if you have ever used floppy disks. If you find that you cannot copy or move a file in the Finder, it is a pretty good indication that you might have a bad sector and should make use of this tool.

Benchtest
This tool is meant to give you an idea about how your other hardware components and drivers affect the performance of your drive. Useful to those who do a lot of live capturing or host a server with many, many small files, this tool will not be very handy to the casual user.

Initialize
Tool prepares a disk for usage in a Mac by installing the Apple driver, writing a partition map and then creating a new volume and mounting it to the desktop.

Repartition
This tool is probably the most coveted one in the entire package. It gives you the power to resize and manage partitions without having to erase the entire volume. It is very easy to use, but at the same time, it it very easy to do something wrong with it, and destroy valuable information. Even though the interface is simple and intuitive, there are certain rules that yo will not know unless you read the manual thoroughly.

Last Thoughts
Although the program looks nice enough, it has a bad habit of opening up many windows, and since it has no windows menu, you are left having to Drag windows around in order to find the ones underneath. Also, many of the more advanced and potentially dangerous tools are very easy to access, and since some people are not in the habit of reading manuals before they dive in the new soft, then can ignorantly cause serious damage to their drives. Other than this the mounting and unmounting of drives and volumes it painstakingly slow.

The Good
Many great features that you can't get anywhere else, all packed into one program that takes care of all your disk diagnostic and repair needs.

The Bad
There is some redundancy as many features present in Drive Genius can also be found in OS X, and it is a bit overpriced from this point of view. The price would have been justified, however, if it had any sort automation.

The Truth
If you need some of those tools that only Drive Genius can offer, you need it. It is a powerful collection of tools, and treated as a whole, not a sum of the tools, it is one of the better solutions, even at that price.

Here are some screenshots so you can see for yourself, click to enlarge: