Our antivirus analysis shows that this Mac download is safe. The most popular version of the software is 3.2. The application belongs to System Tools. You can set up this app on Mac OS X 10.6.7 or later. The program is also known as 'Drive Genius 2', 'Drive Genius 210', 'Drive Genius 2 kopio'.

Quick Summary

Drive Genius 5 promises to keep your computer running smoothly while ensuring you don’t lose any valuable data. The app combines virus scanning, data recovery and cleanup, defragmentation and cloning, and more. The DrivePulse utility constantly scans for issues before they become a problem. That’s a lot of value for $79. More expensive plans are available for professionals and enterprise customers.

Is Drive Genius worth it? If you use your Mac to make money or store valuable information, then it’s worth every cent. The collection of tools it provides is more comprehensive than any of its competitors. However, if you are a casual computer user there are some free utilities that provide basic data recovery, if you need it at all. Read our detailed Drive Genius review below for more.

What I Like

• A good collection of tools combined in a single program.
• Proactively scans for problems and warns you in advance.
• Protects you from viruses and other malware.
• Frees disk space and speeds your hard drive.

What I Don't Like

• Scans take a lot of time.
• Scan results could include more information.

Drive Genius 5

Quick Navigation

Drive Genius 4 For Mac Sierra Vista

// Why Trust Me?
// Drive Genius FAQs
// ​Drive Genius Review: What's in it for You?
// ​Reasons Behind My Reviews and Ratings
// ​Alternatives to Drive Genius
// Conclusion

Why Trust Me?

My name is Adrian Try. I’ve been using computers since 1988, and Macs full time since 2009. I’ve dealt with lots of slow and problem-ridden computers over the years while doing over-the-phone tech support and maintaining training rooms full of PCs. I spent years running optimization and repair software like Norton Utilities, PC Tools, and SpinRite. I spend countless hours scanning computers for problems and malware. I learned the value of a comprehensive cleanup and repair app.

For the last week, I’ve been running the trial version of Drive Genius 5 on my macOS Sierra-based iMac. Users have the right to know what is and isn’t working about a product, so I’ve run every scan and thoroughly tested every feature.

In this Drive Genius review, I’ll share what I like and dislike about the app. The content in the quick summary box above serves as a short version of my findings and conclusions. Read on for the details!

Drive Genius FAQs

What is Drive Genius?

It is a collection of utilities that work together to keep your Mac healthy, fast, uncluttered and virus free. Drive Genius scans for problems automatically using the DrivePulse utility. It also enables you to periodically scan for problems manually and repair a variety of hard drive issues.

To repair your startup disk you will need to boot from another drive. Drive Genius facilitates this by creating a secondary boot drive called BootWell that contains the suite of utilities. To cover all of those features you would normally need to purchase several products.

Here are the program’s main benefits:

• It monitors your drives for issues before they become problems.
• It protects your computer from malware.
• It protects your files from corruption.
• It speeds file access by defragmenting your drives.
• It frees drive space by cleaning unneeded files.

How Much Is It?

Drive Genius does the lot for $79. According to Cult of Mac, Drive Genius is used by the Apple Genius Bar.

Is It Safe to Use?

Yes, it is safe to use. I ran and installed Drive Genius 5 on my iMac. A scan using Bitdefender found no viruses or malicious code. In fact, the app’s malware scan will keep your computer safer.

If you interrupt some of the app’s utilities while they are in use, for example, Defragment, you could cause damage to your files, and possibly lose data. Clear warnings are displayed whenever care must be taken. Just make sure you don’t turn off your computer during those procedures.

How to Turn Off DrivePulse on Menu Bar?

DrivePulse is running continually to ensure the safety of your computer. It’s fine to leave it running, and won’t interfere with your work. How do you turn off DrivePulse when that’s necessary? Just open Drive Genius’ preferences and click Disable DrivePulse.

But there are times you may want to turn off as many background processes as possible to achieve optimal performance on your computer. For example, many podcasters do this while they are recording a Skype call.

Drive Genius Review: What’s in it for You?

Since the app is all about protecting, speeding, and cleaning your Mac, I’m going to list all its features by putting them into the following five sections. In each subsection, I’ll first explore what the app offers and then share my personal take.

1. Monitor Your Drives for Issues Before They Become Problems

Drive Genius doesn’t just wait for you to initiate a scan, it proactively monitors your computer for problems and warns you as soon as it finds one. The background scanning feature is called DrivePulse.

It can monitor physical and logical hard disk damage, file fragmentation, and viruses.

DrivePulse is a menu bar tool. When you click on it you can see the status of the scans, and the health of your hard drives. Here’s a screenshot of the day I installed it. A S.M.A.R.T. check verified that my hard drive is healthy, and understandably the status of the other checks is Pending since I just installed the app.

I took the screenshot below six days later. The status of most of the scans is still Pending. The Physical check on my drive is still only 2.4% complete, so it takes quite a while to thoroughly check everything systematically. Every file I access, however, is checked immediately.

2. Protect Your Computer from Malware

Drive Genius will scan your system for viruses—in real-time with DrivePulse, and systematically on-demand with Malware Scan. Infected files are moved to the trash.

The Malware Scan is very thorough and takes many hours to complete—on my iMac it took around eight hours. But it does this in the background so you can continue to use your computer. For me, it found five infected email attachments.

3. Protect Your Drives from Corruption

Data is lost when hard disks go bad. That’s never good. It can happen when a drive is physically faulty or degrading because of age. And it can happen when there are logical problems with the way data is stored, for example, file and folder corruption.

Drive Genius scans for both types of problem, and can often repair logical errors. The scans are thorough and take some time. On my iMac’s 1TB drive, each scan took between six and ten hours.

The Physical Check looks for physical damage on your hard drive.

Thankfully my Mac’s eight-year-old drive was given a clean bill of health, though it would be nice if the app said that, rather than just “Physical Check completed.”

The Consistency Check looks for file and folder corruption to verify that your data is stored safely.

Again, I have a happy Mac. If this scan found problems, Drive Genius would be able to rebuild the folder structure so that the file names are re-linked to their data, or repair logical file and folder errors.

To repair my startup drive, DiskGenius would install itself on a second Bootwell drive and reboot.

Using the trial version I was able to create a Bootwell disk and boot from it, but not run any scans.

4. Speed File Access by Defragmenting Your Drives

A fragmented file is stored piecemeal across several locations on your hard drive and takes longer to read. I’ve been defragmenting hard drives since my first 40MB hard drive in the 80s. On Windows, it made a huge difference to my drive’s speed, and it can make a noticeable difference on Macs as well, especially if you have a lot of large files, like video, audio, and multimedia files over 1GB in size.

I tested the Defragmentation feature on my 2TB USB backup drive. (I wasn’t able to defrag my startup drive with the trial version.) The process took 10 hours.

During the scan, I wasn’t given any visual feedback on progress (other than the timer at the bottom of the window), or any indication of how fragmented the drive was (I don’t think it was particularly fragmented). That’s unusual. With other defrag utilities I could watch the data being moved around during the process.

When the defrag had completed, I received the following diagram of my drive.

5. Free Hard Disk Space by Cleaning Unneeded Files

Drive Genius has a number of other utilities that are able to help you work with your drives and files. Two of these are designed to help free up hard drive space by cleaning up duplicate files and locating large files.

The Find Duplicates utility locates duplicate files on your hard drive. It then keeps one copy of your file (the one most recently accessed), and replaces the other copies with an alias to the first file. That way you are only storing the data once, but can still access the file from all of those locations. Once the duplicates are found, the app gives you the option of deleting any instances you don’t need.

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Large files obviously take up quite a lot of storage. That’s fine if you need them, but a waste of space if they’re old and unnecessary. Drive Genius 5 provides a Find Large Files scan that finds them, then lets you decide what to do with them. You can control how large the files listed are, as well as how old. Older files are more likely to be no longer be needed, but make sure you check carefully before deleting.

Drive Genius also contains utilities to clone, securely erase, initialize and partition your drives.

Reasons Behind My Reviews and Ratings

Effectiveness: 4/5

This app combines a virus scanner, cleanup tool, data recovery utility, defragmentation tool and hard drive cloning into a single application. That’s a lot of functionality for a single app. Drive Genius’s scans are thorough, but at the expense of speed. Be prepared to spend a lot of time with this app. I wish I was given more detailed scan results and better visual feedback.

Price: 4/5

At $79 the app is not cheap, but it includes a lot of features for the money. To find an alternative, you probably need to purchase two of three other utilities to cover the same ground, possibly costing hundreds of dollars in total.

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

DrivePulse works automatically, and the rest of Drive Genius is a simple push button affair. Clear and concise descriptions are displayed for every feature. That makes it a very easy program to use.

Support: 4.5/5

Technical support is available via phone or email, I didn’t encounter any problems while using the app, so can’t comment on the responsiveness or quality of that support. A PDF user guide and comprehensive FAQ are available. While video tutorials were created for Drive Genius 3 and 4, they, unfortunately, have not been reproduced for the current version of the app.

Alternatives to Drive Genius

Few programs cover Drive Genius’s impressive range of features. You may need to choose several alternatives to cover the same ground.

If you’re looking for a suite similar to Drive Genius, consider:

• TechTool Pro 9: TechTool Pro ($99.99) is one tool with many functions, including drive testing and repair, hardware and memory testing, cloning, and volume and file optimization.
• Stellar Drive ToolBox: Stellar Drive ToolBox ($69) is a comprehensive pack of useful tools to manage and optimize your Mac including hard drive monitoring and defrag, cloning, searching for large files and more.
• DiskWarrior 5: DiskWarrior is a suite of hard drive utilities that repair drive problems, recover missing files and monitors your drive’s health.

If you’re looking for security software to protect your Mac from malware, consider:

• Malwarebytes: Malwarebytes protects your computer from malware and keeps it running silky smooth.
• Norton Security: Norton Security protects your Macs, PCs, Android and iOS devices from malware with a single subscription.

If you’re looking for a Mac cleaning tool, consider:

Drive Genius For Mac

• CleanMyMac X: CleanMyMac can free up a decent amount of hard drive space for you quickly, starting at $89. Read our CleanMyMac review.
• MacPaw Gemini 2: Gemini 2 is a less expensive app that specializes in finding duplicate files. One-time payment starts at $19.99. Read our Gemini review.
• iMobie MacClean: MacClean will free up space on your Mac’s hard drive, protect you from malware, and boost your privacy as well. Costing just $29.99 for a personal license it’s good value, though it’s not able to repair hard drive problems. Read our MacClean review.

Conclusion

Drive Genius constantly monitors your hard drive and fixes issues before they become major problems. It scans for viruses, and automatically moves infected files to the trash. It monitors for file fragmentation that slows your computer, and pops up a warning. It does all of this without you lifting a finger.

Besides that, it includes a comprehensive set of tools that scan for and fix problems, free hard drive space, and clone, partition and securely erase your drives. These features are essential if you require a reliable, safe and secure work environment. If that sounds like you, then I highly recommend Drive Genius. The program offers excellent value for money when you consider all of the functions it can perform.

If you are a casual home user, and don’t have anything stored on your computer that you would miss if it vanished, then Drive Genius may be more than you need. Just make sure you keep a backup of anything important, and consider the free utilities if something goes wrong.

Drive Genius 5.1.0

Drive Genius gives you faster performance from your Mac while also protecting it. The award-winning and improved DrivePulse feature alerts you to hard drive issues before they become major problems. Optimized for OS X 10.10 Yosemite, top features like Defrag and DriveSlim will help keep your Mac running fast. The all-new BootWell tool lets you create a special bootable secondary drive to Defrag or Repair your main hard drive. You can also personalize and organize your Mac hard drive icons with IconGenius.
Drive Genius 5 Features:

• Protect:
• Malware Scan
• BootWell™
• Physical Check
• Instant DrivePulse
• Active Files
• Consistency Check
• Repair
• Rebuild

Speed Up:

• Defragment
• Speed

Clean Up:

• Repartition
• Find Duplicates
• Find Large Files
• Clone
• Secure Erase
• Initialize
• IconGenius™
• Information

Why do I need Antivirus for Mac?
With Macs becoming more common in and out of the workplace, hackers are developing attacks specifically for the Mac platform. These hackers either attack the Mac itself or to lay dormant until a connection is made to a Windows based system. Only 50% of Mac users are running virus protection when compared to the 76% of Windows users. That’s why Prosoft Engineering implemented an automated Malware Scan into Drive Genius 5.
Protect your Mac
Drive Genius helps to protect your Mac from potential hard drive failures and errors that can cause you to lose your data. The award-winning DrivePulse® feature monitors the health of your hard drives to alert you to potential issues (errors, fragmentations, bad blocks) before they become a major problem.
DrivePulse® has been enhanced to do more extensive testing once the drive has been idle for 5 minutes.

• Heuristic engine analysis to notify you if a drive needs to be replaced before it actually stops working.
• Monitors your hard drive for system changes during login and notifies you when a change occurs (a common avenue for a virus to infect your computer).
• Monitors for low free space and notifies you when your hard drive is filling up.
• Prevents your hard drive from sleeping when your computer is in use. This prevents applications from hanging while waiting for a sleeping disk to wake.

What's New:

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Version 5.1.0:

• Release notes were unavailable when this listing was updated.

Screenshots:

• Title: Drive Genius 5.1.0
• Developer: Prosoft Engineering, Inc.
• Compatibility: macOS 10.10 +
• Language: English
• Includes: serial
• Size: 66.69 MB
• visit official website