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. In a head to head review vs the competition, Drive Genius was named “Labs Winner” as the best tool in its class*. Whether you’re a novice home user, professional computer technician or anything in between, Drive Genius from Prosoft Engineering is the best tool to maintain, manage and optimize your hard drive.
Traditionally, hard drive maintenance and management has been difficult, time-consuming and confusing. In many cases people skip these critical activities - sometimes leading to disaster. Thankfully, Drive Genius makes these tedious tasks painless, fast, and easy. From performance tuning to disaster prevention, Drive Genius provides all the tools needed to take control of your hard drive, and your digital life.
Tags: system , hfs , utility , smart , drive , repair




2 Opinions:
Excellent. As mentioned, the only app (so far) that allows you to physically scan the HDD for bad sectors.
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The only downside is that version 1.2 allowed you to scan the HDD from the CD when inserted (ie from Finder, insert the boot disk and run the sector scan from within OSX without having to log out). The latest version however, requires you to reboot from the CD before doing any sector scan to the HDD....a more cumbersome process (of course, this just maybe something I'm doing wrong here
I also use DiskWarrior as well as this app (use Diskwarrior first, and this second if the problem isn't solved). I also have Techtool Pro (free with AppleCare) but don't find that as good as these other two.
Overall=something your mac shouldn't be without.
This in conjuction with DiskWarrior are what I use to get machines happy and healthy again. Drive Genius is the only app I know of that is able to scan for bad blocks on a drive. Highly recommended!