Drive Genius
Official web site: Drive Genius
On Apple's web site: Drive Genius
Since its introduction at Macworld San Francisco back in 2005, Drive Genius from Prosoft Engineering has become THE industry standard disk utility for the Mac platform. Directory Repair, Disk Defrag and Repartition-on-the-fly are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius. (apple.com)
Cost
Current version, 3.3.1, requires an Intel Mac.
You will have two downloads in your emailed receipt upon purchase. One is the application and the other is the full boot DVD image (so you can burn your own bootable DVD right in your home or office).
- Option 1 - Personal Use License - $99
License to use/scan/recover, only on hard drives that you personally own. This includes the bootable DVD image, it does not need to be purchased separately. - Option 2 - Professional Use License - $249
This license is perfect for a service shop, IT group or mobile IT professional (allows you to use/scan/recover with customer-owned drives or company owned drives. This includes the bootable DVD image, it does not need to be purchased separately. - Upgrade from version 2- $49
DrivePulse®
Monitors the health of your hard drive daily when your computer is idle to quickly check for errors, fragmentation, or bad blocks. When the computer is idle for five minutes, DrivePulse will perform quick tests to check the health of the hard drive.
Physical problems
- Performs a Scan on a disk to search for bad blocks on the hard drive ensuring the physical integrity of the device
- Scheduled to Scan once a week (about an hour) and will pause its progress when the computer is active again
Volume consistency problems
- Performs a Verify on the volume to assess the integrity of the catalog and directory structures
- Scheduled to perform a Volume verification once a day, which takes about 2 minutes to complete
Volume fragmentation
- Scans the volume catalog and its files to determine the amount of fragmentation
- Scheduled to check the fragmentation status once a week, which takes about 10 seconds to complete
(prosofteng.com)
Defragmentation
Is your Mac running slower? Is your hard drive filling up and you don't know why? Are you seeing the beach ball more or having other issues with your hard drive?
Drive Genius 3 addresses both free space and data fragmentation on a hard drive. The Defrag feature in Drive Genius 3 reorganizes the fragmented pieces of all files, no matter what their size or fragmentation level, and compacts their content into one contiguous block for optimal access times. In addition, Drive Genius reorganizes the files themselves so they exist in one contiguous block. By compacting the files, the free space is returned to one large block for Mac OS X to write new files without data fragmentation.
Defragmenting your drives will lead to faster boot time, faster application launch, and faster access to your large media files, databases, and virtual machine images. (prosofteng.com)