Drive Genius 3
Monday, 20 September 2010
Drive Genius 3is the latest version of the powerful tool from ProSoft Engineering. With DG3 you can find big files and delete duplicates and unneeded localisations with DriveSlim, partition and repartition your drive, repair, defragment more powerfully than Apple’s default Mac OS X routines, and of course you can repair most problems.
It’s no speed demon – nothing can be with the massive drives we use these days – but it’s a virtual life saver.
I’m not a fan of intrusive utilities – those that manage and monitor constantly tend to slow things down. With some antivirus software, I not only resent the slowdowns – in particular I suspect constant meddling in the code stream creates additional problems.
Drive Genius 3 is faster than DG2 – it now runs as a 64-bit application and includes a new feature called DrivePulse, a monitor for the overall health of your drive, alerting you to possible issues before they become major problems.
I have all my files on an external drive, a holdover from constant Mac swapping to test things. It saves me having to constantly move files from one Mac to another – now I just install the applications I need on the Mac of the month.
But this makes that external drive a crucial element – DrivePulse detected a problem and let me repair it, for which I was most thankful.
DG3 also offers RAID Support for those bigger, critical installations used by companies and AV professionals, and it gives Email Notifications of remote Macs a tech may like to monitor.
People usually take one of two approaches to hard drive maintenance – things start going wrong so they take action (or call an expensive technician), or check and monitor their drives periodically.
My own approach has been to Repair Permissions with Apple’s free Disk Utility every few weeks and do a much more fundamental fix disk command at startup via Unix when I’m really bothered.
It’s easier to let new features in Drive Genius 3 take over and recommend action when things are actually getting problematic.
Drive Genius 3 lets you ‘optimise’ your drive’s structure – this is the product used by Apple at the Stores’ Genius Bars.
The Manual
It’s worth reading the included PDF help files before embarking on any serious operations – it’s well written and informative. However, I think the chapters in the manual should reflect the order of the icons you can use in the DG3 interface.
InterfaceI still find the moving, zooming interface icons annoying – it can be like ducking for apples to grab the one you want. But if you’re like me and don't appreciate this graphical wizardry, you can just open Preferences and uncheck 'Enable animated user interface'.
You have two screens – the first one as, left to right, Information, Defrag, DriveSlim, Repair, Scan and DrivePulse, then click the right-side, right-facing green arrow to load the second screen.
Here you get Integrity Check, Initialize, Repartition, Duplicate, Shred, BenchTest and Sector Edit.
Information really gets into the details of your drives – folder counts, sectors, dataClump .. you get the picture.
Defragmenting
Defrag shows you a graphic of your drive’s level of file fragmentation – basically, a large file deposited as a single strip on a hard drive’s magnetic platter boots up faster, whereas a fragmented drive means a file has to save in several segments the computer has to locate and put back together, then load. For AV work, a fragmented drive really slows things down.
You can do this yourself – Mac OS X defragments on the fly when you’re not working and after installations, but if you really want to do a fundamental and sector0efficient job, you can’t beat a feature like this one.
The alternative, do-it-yourself version is to copy all the files off a drive, nuke it and copy them all back on. Imagine the time that would take, and the risks involved if there’s a power outage or other calamity in the middle of the process?
Actually, this is still a risk even with DG3 – you do get a rather dire warning before you actually run the defragmentation routine. But it is convenient being able to defragment an external volume overnight or something. My 1TB took about 12 hours.
Graphically (above), green means unfragmented, continuous files, white is free space, and red is fragmented files. My HD is pretty good but I ran DG3’s defragment three or four weeks before the screenshot was taken. Of course, you can’t actually defragment a volume the Mac boots from, unless you launch Drive Genius from an external DVD or drive. The manual has instructions on how to create a DVD you can use for this or you can order the DVD so it's posted to you.
DriveSlim
This is a good feature with ‘slimming plans’ built in. Choose any or all from from Localizations, Large Files, Duplicate Files, Universal Binaries and Cache/Temporary items.
Apple proactively puts in language and keyboard settings for many, many languages. This is cool, but if you’re a typical English speaker, you only speak English and maybe one or two other languages. So get rid of Cherokee, Suomi and Tibetan and dozens of others by running the Localizations’ scan.
When Apple was transitioning from PowerPC Macs to Intel, everyone had to build Universal Binaries that could run on both CPUs.
This is no longer done, as the transition was accomplished years ago. Intyel apps are much leaner as a result. But you can delete any legacy G4-G5 code in your system by running this scan and deleting at will.
Cache files get replenished constantly, but if they’ve got out of control, you may be pleasantly surprised when you delete existing ones. Plus, they can be sources of corruption – like Preference files, it’s often a good idea to make your Mac start over and rebuild them from scratch and to existing conditions, rather than retaining irrelevant data from old applications.
Looking for large and duplicate files obviously takes a little more care – is the duplicate just a file with the same name? Which one are you deleting? DG3 looks for more criteria than just name (file size and type, for example) but still, before you press Delete it pays to know what you’re deleting.
Same with large files. The Titanic you bought is 3.3GB? Crikey … but you bought it – do you have a copy?
With DriveSlim, you can also choose to inspect folders within drives.
Using DriveSlim, my MacBook Pro’s built in 500GB HD had just 44.71GB left. I turned on the options to find caches older than 14 days, duplicate files, find language localisations I didn’t use and look for Universal Binaries (apps that can work on both the G4-G5 families of processors and Intel Macs). After running Slim Disk and deleting all relevant files listed, I gained an additional 6GBs, almost (50.39GBs available).
On a 1TB external hard drive with 492.95GB available, running DriveSlim looking just for duplicate files, unused localisations, Universal Binaries and cache/temporary items (and leaving the option to find large files off – it’s a backup drive, after all), and being overly cautions, I still gained back a lot, ending with another 16GBs (508.87GBs) free.
Make sure you uncheck and vital files the list presents after the scan is run – it’s well worth a careful read before you do anything rash.
A defrag on the same 1TB external drive took about 14 hours over USB2 – I left it running overnight. This, after running Repair, stopped it making that clicking noise that brings concern, even nausea to experienced computer users.
Repair
If your drive is really dying, nothing will save it. But it’s a bit like sick humans – early intervention usually saves the day. It’s a good idea to make sure everything’s happy in hard drive world be running repair immediately, then letting DrivePulse keep track from then on.
Remember that to repair an external hard drive, it has to unmount it – so any files on it will not be accessible while the repair or other process is running. By the same token, if you have a file or application lodged on that drive open, DG3 will not be able to unmount it and do the work. (That’s why I run long processes overnight.)
But I’d prefer DG3 said ‘Cannot perform operation on this drive until you quit running applications or open documents’ (or something) before running a lengthy unmount process that doesn’t work and then just tells you it can’t unmount the volume..
You have options to verify (basically, tell you everything’s OK or not without doing anything about it), repair, rebuild, repair permissions (in the Unix file structure – you can also do this with Disk Utility) and verify preferences.
On an internal drive, without booting it from Drive Genius on an external volume with a system, you can verify, repair permissions to Apple’s specs, and verify preferences – basically, this last checks the integrity of the preference settings for everything that you may have made or modified. If it finds an error, it can’t repair it – but it lets you find that file and delete it. Then it’s a simple matter of booting the tied application up, opening Preferences from the application’s menu and resetting it.
A corrupt preference file can cause all sorts of damage and crashing, and it’s hard to identify. The manual process is to delete batches of preferences until the crashing stops, but you need to know where to look and since OS X there are myriad system files – so this is a good feature!
On an external drive, you can do everything except repair permissions on it.
Rebuild is an interesting option – it rebuilds the drive table that holds the file information (the Catalog B-Tree). It rebuilds the structure based on existing content of the rest of the drive, so it may fix errors that Repair cannot.
I’d like an option to run all repairs mode sin one big blat, myself.
But I was satisfied that the repair processes were effective.
Scan
This just checks that every sector can be read correctly, with several depth levels of scans. This is for getting to the detail of sectors that may be faulty.
DrivePulseThis is basically a separate utility that automatically monitors the health of hard drives and volumes. It’s designed to perform a quick check when your computer is idle, rather than intrusively charge about checking things when you’re trying to work, and it seems to fulfil this function well in several weeks of testing.
If you have a MacBook, you can choose an option to suspend checks while on battery power, monitor external drives yes or no, and to display alerts for critical conditions only.
An Event Viewer displays what processes have been run, and you can also open Drive Genius 3 itself from the menu DrivePulse installs as a right-side menu – this is installed instantly by turning DrivePulse on in DG3 (above).
Integrity Check
On the second screen you get the other 7 options. Integrity Check runs over a period (choose from 1, 5 or 30 minutes, or 1 hour or 1 day). This options is for if you suspect a drive has an intermittent fault – it will hopefully show up in one of the runs.
Initialize (sic)
You can initialise a drive from Apple’s free Disk Utility. DG3’s offer’s the choice or wiping a drive and formatting it with the Apple Partition Map or the GUID Partition Table.
Apple’s utility actually gives you more options – Mac OS Extended (Journalled), Mac OS Extended, Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journalled), Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive), and MS-DOS (FAT).
The initialise process in DG3 wipes your drive (yes, it wipes your drive – files will almost certainly not be retrievable after, so back up first!) and installs the Apple driver and a partition map on the first few thousand blocks of your drive.
ProSoft seems to have designed this to be quick and easy. Modern Intel Macs all use the GUID scheme – the Apple Partition Map is for the obsolete G4-G5 Macs. The second should therefore be the default, I feel.
Repartition
Some Macs have partitions. As far as the OS is concerned, one drive with partitions is treated as separate drives that mount individually on your desktop – useful for having a Microsoft Windows section, for example, or one partition just for a certain type of file or use.
Since moving partitions around and/or resizing them can result in data loss (existing data affected by, say, shrinking a partition), it’s a good idea to read the manual on this section carefully.
It’s a comprehensive tool – it can even be used to physically move partitions around.
Duplicate
It seems an unnecessary tool but DG3’s Duplicate function is fast, using the Device Copy routine to copy every detail across – this means a bootable volume at origin stays a bootable volume on the duplicate, with permissions and system files all copied detail by detail.
It can even be used to clone Linux and Windows drives and can duplicate a whole device, with or without verification.
Shred
This makes sure deleted files are shredded so they can’t be retrieved – this is handy if you’re selling a Mac or hard drive and you don’t want anyone running a file restoration over it and getting your data, images etc back.
But use with caution – it really does shed ’em.
Benchtest
Benchtest lets you see if a drive is performing to expectations. This can be quite useful if you have some basic knowledge about your hard drive. For instance, if you know it should have a sustained read of 12MBs per second, you can check if it’s running near this level or not. If it’s not, it’s either fragmented, has problems or your interface is gippy.
It performs four different tests, and lets you preform them against a set of supplied Mac configuration base lines, and you can save your results for later comparisons, or for one drive, or one interface, against another (is FireWire 400 faster than USB2?).
Sector Edit
This is the most power-user of the tools and therefore the most dangerous. Sector Edit lets you edit the actual bits and bytes of a hard drive. Yikes. Be afraid. It will let you edit the data on any volume. You really need to know what you are doing and, frankly, most people don’t. So don’t! But hey, the capability is there.
Conclusion — Drive Genius 3 tries to make the complex and challenging world of hard drive maintenance and management painless, fast and easy.
It’s not fast (nothing could be, in these days of massive drives), but it’s about as painless and easy as it could be.
In my tests it definitely worked better and was more effective on a 2007 MacBook Pro than on a dodgy 2005 iMac, so it may not be suited for fettling older machines. That said, the iMac was dodgy in lots of different ways and is about to be retired (ie wiped, checked, reinstalled with the basics and set up in the kitchen for YouTube and recipe searches).
What’s Great — it saved a drive. DrivePulse proved invaluable with my main external file volume. It’s pretty easy to use yet really powerful.
What’s not — there are a few inconsistencies with the manual not following the order of DG3’s capabilities. It could warn you need to quit out of apps before checking a drive rather than after.
Needs — a confident user with a lot to keep track of.
8.5/10
What — Drive Genius 3, US$99 for a single user licence (about NZ$141). Professional licence is US$249 for working on many drives. Upgrade from DG1 or 2 US$49. Special Deal – go to this site http://www.prosofteng.com/specials/ and get Drive Genius 3 in a bundle with Data Rescue 3 for US$149 (save US$49).
Contact — ProSoft Engineering
