Product Reviews

When it comes to protecting and repairing Macs, Drive Genius is one of the most comprehensive tools around. Its developer, Prosoft, boasts that the program is the diagnostic tool used in Apple's own retail stores. This new version not only promises speed and usability improvements alongside support for Mac OS X 10.5, but a stunning animated user interface.

The new look is a leap forward from the staid appearance of most disk utilities. Over two screens, icons of each of the program's 11 tools are arranged in a semicircle against a dark background. As you move the mouse over a tool's icon, a brief text explanation of its purpose appears at the bottom of the program window and the view zooms into that tool. When you select it, the main interface fades to reveal a standard window, with available volumes shown in a pane on the left and the selected tool's functions displayed on the right.

However impressive the animation, which doesn't appear on older, slower Macs, its role is largely presentational. You can turn it off in the program's preferences to revert to a traditional view. In terms of functionality, Drive Genius' performance-measurement programs are comprehensive. They range from a basic informational tool to a speedy benchmarking application that measures a selected disk's performance with various read and write tests on it and displaying the results on a graph or as raw data. This can display your disk's performance against that of a catalog of other Mac drives, from a G3 iBook to a 3GHz Mac Pro. A similar chart overview is offered by the 'integrity check' feature, which measures the validity of a disk. Here, you can specify the duration of the integrity test, from one minute to a day.

The Scan tool, which checks a disk for bad sectors and de-allocates them so they won't be used by your Mac to store

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data, is useful if predictably ponderous - it took nearly an hour to scan an external USB disk. But the superb animation of the disk checking makes the wait more bearable.

Not all the tools are as impressive: the Defrag tool took a while to defrag a 120GB external disk, with little effect on subsequent performance. Given that we were warned before starting to defragment of the dire risk to data if the process was interrupted, it's not something we would run regularly.

Other disk functions, such as Shred, Disk Initialize, Duplicate and Repartition are largely alternatives to features found in Apple's own Disk Utility. Collected here they have the advantage of being easier to use: for example, duplicating disks in Drive Genius is a step or two simpler than it is in Disk Utility and the program's visual approach to repartitioning, which shows a pie-chart view of the way a disk is split, is easy to understand as well as speedy and non-destructive.

There are features that you won't find in Disk Utility, including a Sector Editor, an amazingly powerful tool that lets you edit the raw data on drives, folders or files. A wrong move here could have catastrophic results, but to experts, it's invaluable. The Repair tool is also powerful: alongside verify and repair options, a Rebuild function recreates the Catalog B-Tree responsible for managing the location of files on a volume.

As you'd expect, you can't directly repair the startup disk or the one running Drive Genius, but the program's DVD is bootable. Using this method we were able to rid our hard drive of a couple of problems we hadn't been able to solve with Disk Utility.

There are a few caveats, though: booting - into Mac OS X 10.4.9 rather than Mac OS X 10.5 - takes several minutes and although it ran Drive Genius fine, it couldn't perform any other tasks, such as changing the startup disk, on both our test Macs. It's worth noting that Drive Genius can't boot some Macs shipped in the latter half of 2007, although the company promises an update. Handily, given how frequently those servicing multiple Macs have to update bootable discs, users can download a fresh 300MB boot image at any time from the Prosoft site for a $5 charge.

While some of Drive Genius's features aren't unique, gathered here they form the most comprehensive set of tools available. You may only occasionally need its services, but when you do, it's worth it.