Product Review
Reviewer: Paul Vaona
Product: Drive Genius 3
Company: ProSoft Engineering
Web: www.prosofteng.com
Contact: 877.477.6763
Price: $99; upgrade $49
Pros: Powerful
Cons: Underutilized (Unneeded?) Tools
Product Rating: 3/5 Good
by Paul Vaona, Alaskan Apple Users Group Member
Conflict of interest disclosure: Prosoft Engineering, Inc. provided me a free copy of Drive Genius 3 for the purposes of the review.
Installation seemed to go quick and efficient with both the downloadable and DVD versions. If purchasing the downloadable version you must pay the extra $5 for a download boot disk to take advantaged of all the applications within this program. This seems a little silly as so many tools require the bootable DVD, it would make more sense to make it part of the normal download not something separate and for an addition charge.
Defrag is probably the most thought of application when a drive utility in mention and the Drive Genius 3 is a powerful application in this to for to be sure. As baseline understanding my MacBook is 18 months old, used daily for photo workflow and about 67% of the hard drive is filled. When launched, Defrag displayed rather chaotic visual representation of my hard drive and informed me that it was 55% fragmented, what this truly means I have never been able to determine. Next, in the words of Ronco, I just set it and forgot it. Drive Genius 3 was so kind to email me upon its completion some three and a half hours later. Very Cool! This was a great enhancement as many of the tools required a long time to run. Alas after performing the Defrag though and seeing a rather organized and far less chaotic hard drive representation I noted no improvement in speed and or hard drive performance. This is not to say that performance was not improved it just wasn’t enough to be noted in my particular case.
I would have to say Drive Genius 3 is not for the novice or faint-of-heart. I found that it was too easy to corrupt data and even though back up is available, I don’t think is something a less then experienced user would like to attempt but, I think for the advanced user the tools for editing sectors and changing partitions would be a great benefit. Tools such as Sector Editor and Repartitioning were very helpful and there are many user that will appreciate this part of the software.
Overall I must say my experience with Drive Genius 3 is mixed. Powerful as the tools may be I never notice a significant improvement in performance or space. With the exception of few tools I drove Drive Genius as hard as I could and it never faltered so; has my computer been improved with Drive Genius? I think so but nothing that I can measure. The aspects that seem the most helpful remain unused at this time. If and when I upgrade my hard drive or replace this laptop, the Initialize, Shred and Clone options will be welcome tools. I will continue to watch the DrivePulse and monitor my drive performance.
Prosoft might benefit from releasing a slimmed down version targeted at the more general user. Something that would improve the overall drive performance of the average Mac user’s computer.
System requirements; Mac OS X v10.5.3 or newer, an Intel-based Mac, 512MB of RAM and a DVD drive.
