Drive Genius 5: An Essential Mac Protection And Optimization Software
By Prosoft Engineering, Inc. to Sponsored Content | Mar 12, 2023
The amount of data that we are creating and storing is at an all-time high and continues to increase as we collect our documents, audio, videos, images, and more, on a variety of data storage devices. Whether it is the internal boot drive of our computer, or any number of external drives, it is important to take steps to monitor the health of these different storage devices, maintain their performance, and protect against viruses and other malicious attacks that can compromise the safety of our data.
Drive Genius from Prosoft Engineering is an essential mac protection software that offers a variety of features designed to clean up, speed up, and protect your computer. We'll take a look at several of the utilities included in the software that are valuable tools for protecting and optimizing your Mac.
## How Drive Genius Protects Your Mac
In addition to being able to run any of the protection utilities manually on a single drive, the main way Drive Genius protects your Mac is through its DrivePulse feature. When enabled, DrivePulse will run in the background even when the software is closed, and automate drive integrity testing and malware scans for all drives connected to the computer. It will only run tests when the computer is idle to minimize performance impact on the computer when in use, and will schedule a number of different tests to protect your computer and warn you of potential drive failure before it occurs.
There are a range of Mac protection utilities in Drive Genius, including:
Malware Scan - As the newest addition to the software, the Malware Scan will automatically run through DrivePulse when enabled, and you can also select an individual drive and manually scan it for malware. DrivePulse will also automatically scan downloaded files in common download locations in near real-time. It will scan for known malware and the malware database is updated frequently, often multiple times per day.
Physical Check - This utility is designed to detect hardware issues with drives, so you can backup and replace a drive before failure occurs. To test whether data areas on the drive are damaged and have lost storage capacity, this check will read every data area on the drive to see if the storage device reports any errors. It also has a couple of optional methods including the extended check, which will verify both the read and write ability of every data area. The extended check can find drive faults when other tests, utilities, and even vendors cannot.
Consistency Check - File and folder corruption can lead to data loss. This check will detect corruption by verifying the file and folder structures of your macOS formatted drives.
Repair - This utility will repair a corrupted drive by resolving most logical file and folder errors, which are detected with Consistency Check. This prevents issues and potential data loss from the drive.
Clone - Using this utility allows you to copy all data from one drive to a selected destination drive, making an exact copy that can be used as a backup or replacement if the original drive fails, and protecting you against data loss.
Note: Clone will automatically erase and format the destination to prepare for the operation, so ensure your destination does not contain any data or it can be overwritten.
## How Drive Genius Optimizes Your Mac
Drive Genius has several different drive optimization utilities to keep your computer performance at its best. These include:
Defragment - Adding and removing files from a drive will gradually cause the data on the drive to become fragmented, which will eventually begin to have an impact on drive performance as multiple areas will need to be read to access a single file. This utility will reorder all non-contiguous data areas into a single contiguous area, and all empty areas into another, improving access speed and drive performance. You can defragment both internal and external drives to improve their performance.
Note: Defragment is not available for SSD / Fusion drives as it provides little to no improvement in performance, and the high read/write speeds of modern SSDs minimizes the issue of accessing fragmented data quickly. Defragment is also not supported on APFS formatted drives due to security restrictions.
Find Duplicates - Duplicate files can take up space on your computer without you realizing it. The Find Duplicates feature will identify duplicate files on a selected drive. You can select which duplicates you'd like to remove, and they will be replaced with an alias pointing to the version that was most recently used. This will help you free up precious space on your storage device.
Find Large Files - This feature will also help you free up space on a drive by finding all files larger than a minimum size you set, and that have not been accessed in a time period you specify. You can then select files from the results to delete those that you no longer need. By finding and removing large files you have not used recently, you can free up a significant amount of space on your drive.
## Summary
Drive Genius from Prosoft Engineering is an essential Mac software because of how many different options it provides for protecting and optimizing your computer and storage drives. Malware Scan, Physical Check, Consistency Check, Repair, and Clone all offer different solutions to make sure your data is secure from the threat of malicious applications, corruption issues, and physical hardware failure. This protection can even be automated with the DrivePulse feature. For drive optimization, Defragment, Find Duplicates, and Find Large Files all offer easy ways to free up storage space and boost performance. These are just a selection of the utilities included in the software, so be sure to check out the full capabilities of Drive Genius with its free demo.
