#Drive genius mac
So where does that leave you as a Mac user? Prosoft goes on to say that “Drive Genius 2 is also used at Apple’s Genius Bar in their Apple ProCare program for this primary feature.” Hmm. It also only optimizes the files not the drive, so even though the smaller files are optimized there can be empty space in between the files themselves.” Since Drive Genius 2 (or any other defragging utility) will combine those empty spaces into one contiguous block, one might reasonably expect at least a small performance gain because the drive head doesn’t have to hop around so much.
#Drive genius mac os
This isn’t strictly necessary any more - Apple says you “ probably won’t need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X” and declares “there is little benefit to defragmenting.” Prosoft, on the other hand, argues that “OS X only optimizes files under 20MB.
That’s an unsettling image, but is what you see really a problem? In the years before OS X, periodically optimizing or “defragging” one’s hard drive was required maintenance, or should have been: I learned long ago the hard way by letting our old LCII’s drive get so fragmented, it actually died. This is a disk that according to Apple needs no optimizing, as I’ll elaborate:
#Drive genius free
(Much faster that way.) And here is the app’s graphic representation of the MacBook’s hard drive before I started, with free space shown in lavender.
#Drive genius software
The software comes on a bootable DVD, but I booted from the clone to optimize and test the MacBook. To get started, I installed Drive Genius 2, then cloned the disk to an external hard drive - not with Drive Genius, although I could have. The test machine is an original 1.83 GHz MacBook with 2 MB of DDR2 SDRAM and a 160 GB Hitachi 7200 rpm hard drive with 67 GB of free space remaining, running OS X 10.5.4 with all current software updates, including applications. This in turns improves the overall speed and performance of the drive.” Music to my ears, so for the purposes of this review, I decided to concentrate on defragmenting the hard drive to see if I could speed things up. Drive Genius will optimize the drive by combining all the empty free space together into one contiguous block. (Much more than I can cover in this review.) ProSoft says the app’s target audience is “anyone with a Mac who is interested in improving the speed and performance of their Mac,” but casual users won’t appreciate all this can do.Īccording to the manufacturer, “ Drive Genius’s most popular feature is disk defrag. Drive Genius 2 offers a suite of tools to keep hard drives running smoothly and dependably, including disk defrag, directory repair, repartition on-the-fly, device/volume cloning, integrity testing, benchmarking, secure erase, sector editing, and more. Power users already know what I’m talking about: when you flog your Mac long enough, you may need a disk utility, and this one is truly comprehensive. That could change, though, as more and more people fill up their hard drives with digital media files. Most of them get by just fine, thanks to Apple engineering and the general level of component quality. I’ve also found over the years that average users hardly have a clue when it comes to disk maintenance. Most problems I encounter are simply due to lack of knowledge, not hardware issues. I sometimes tutor Mac users and offer help when things go wrong. Prosoft bills Drive Genius as “THE industry standard disk utility for the Mac platform.” That’s a big claim, so I thought I’d have a look at the latest Leopard-compatible version, Drive Genius 2, to see if I could improve the performance of my 1.83 GHz MacBook.