The guardian of your disks
As I mentioned last week, DrivePulse realtime monitoring is Drive Genius’ best feature (at least in my humble opinion). As you may recall, DrivePulse monitors the health of all connected drives and detects potential data corruption, alerting me of physical or logical issues with my drives before they fail. According to Prosoft, Drive Genius 5 can even predict drive failure before it occurs.
Since writing last week’s column, Drive Genius 5 alerted me to yet another disk-related issue and helped me resolve it before it caused any problems.
I received two alerts that one of my backup drives (named “4TB of backups”) was low on free space. The email said: “4TB of backups is low on free space. Consider removing unneeded files to reclaim free space. Drive Genius’ Find utilities can help with this
process. (9.58 MB currently available, 1.07 GB is recommended for optimal system operation.)”
The onscreen alert a few minutes later was worded a bit more strongly:
“DrivePulse Drive Integrity Warning
“System stability is at risk; ‘4TB of backups’ is critically low on free space. Please remove unneeded files to reclaim free space as soon as possible.”
So, I used Drive Genius’ Find Duplicates and Find Large Files utilities to find and remove nearly 1TB of duplicate and large files. The scan took hours, but it ran in the background and did not interfere with other work on my Mac.
But Drive Genius does much more than just monitoring your drives for issues before they become problems. It also includes utilities for cloning, securely erasing, repartitioning and initializing hard or solid-state drives. There’s also a malware scanner, as well as both physical and consistency checks for your disks.
If you have a rotational (i.e. hard) disk, there is a defragmenting utility that can improve overall performance, boot time, application launch times and how quickly large files open.
Drive Genius also monitors your startup disk for system changes during login and notifies you if a change occurs (this is a common vector for malware).
Finally, Drive Genius can almost always repair or rebuild a damaged disk after it alerts you of the issue.
I’ve used Drive Genius for more than a decade, and I trust it more than any other disk utility. It has proved its value to me time and time again by alerting me to potential problems I’d be oblivious to otherwise, and then letting me repair the damage and get back to work quickly.
The bottom line is that Drive Genius is one of the first apps I install on a new Mac.