Product Reviews

ProSoft's Drive Genius is a suite of disk tools designed to analyse a hard drive, identify and fix current problems and prevent future ones. It also has a few other neat tricks up its sleeve, such as the ability to edit partitions on a disk without erasing it, edit sectors, and clone a disk.

There are eight tools in total, ranging from the very useful Defragment and Clone to the esoteric Edit, which allows you to edit sectors of a disk, and Benchtest, which rates the performance of a disk.

The application supports ATA, SCSI, FireWire and USB disks and includes a bootable CD with support for Macs OS X machines dating back to the first generation iMacs.

Launching Drive Genius displays a brushed metal window with three panes. On the left hand side is a list of the supported drives connected to your Mac, along the bottom are icons

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representing the eight tools, and, in the main pane the currently selected drive together with information gathered by the relevant tool. It's a very clear representaion of what's going on and makes Drive Genius very easy to use. It's just a matter of selecting the drive you want and clicking a tool icon. Depending on which tool you're using, you may be asked for more information before Drive Genius gets down to work.

If you intend working with the hard drive that contains your Mac OS X installation, you'll have to reboot your Mac from the Drive Genius CD, as most of the tests and repairs can't be carried out on a boot volume.

Drive Genius performed well in our tests. Information is presented clearly and checks and repairs are carried out with the minimum of fuss. While the most useful tools are Defragment and Repair, the others, in particular, Duplicate and Shred - which performs a secure deletion of the data on the selected drive - will prove their worth.

ProSoft is rapidly building a reputation for itself in the disk tools market and Drive Genius is a worthy addition to its stable. The documentation could be improved, and we didn't like having to enter the serial number both when we installed the application and the first time we booted from the CD, but these are small issues. At $99, it is good value, even if you only use it to check the health of your hard disk and fix permissions every once in a while.