DriveSlim™ is loaded with these features
Duplicate File Search and Delete
Ever wonder how many duplicate files you have on your hard drive? DriveSlim™ can search for all duplicates, show you their location and let you delete the unnecessary duplicates.
Large File Search and Delete
Your Macintosh is loaded with hundreds of thousands of files on the hard drive and most likely you have some very large files clogging up your hard drive? Whether it's a video of the Dramatic Chipmunk or some funny email attachment someone sent you, chances are you have large files taking up space on your hard drive that you don't know about – Easily find them and delete them from you hard drive.
Multi-language Slimming
Did you know your Mac can speak multiple languages? Unfortunately, unless you speak another language, that feature (and all the files to support it) are just wasting space on your hard drive- With DriveSlim™, you can select which languages you want your Mac to support, and delete the others (that you don't speak).
Universal Binary support removal
When Apple made the transition to Intel-based Macs, applications had to be made in a way that supported the new Intel-based Macs as well as the older PowerPC-based Macs from years back. If you're on an Intel-based Mac you are probably never going to revert back to an older machine that needs Universal support, so why not free up the hard drive space of those support files? DriveSlim™ makes it easy to trim all those down to only support the new Intel-based Macs.
Backup
One of the greatest things about DriveSlim™ is the built-in backup. This feature allows you to backup any and all files that you have marked for deletion in DriveSlim™. That way, you can save the files off to a CD, DVD or hard drive, in case you ever want those files back.
DrivePulse®
DrivePulse® will monitor the health of your hard drive daily when your computer is idle for 5 minutes to quickly check for errors, fragmentation, or bad blocks.
Physical problems
DrivePulse® performs a Scan on a disk to search for bad blocks on the hard drive ensuring the physical integrity of the device. DrivePulse® is scheduled to Scan once a week, which takes about an hour to complete and will pause its progress when the computer is active again.
Volume consistency problems
DrivePulse® performs a Verify on the volume to assess the integrity of the catalog and directory structures. DrivePulse® is scheduled to perform a Volume verification once a day, which takes about 2 minutes to complete.
Volume fragmentation
DrivePulse® scans the volume catalog and its files to determine the amount of fragmentation. DrivePulse® is scheduled to check the fragmentation status once a week, which takes about 10 seconds to complete.
64-Bit
Everyone in the computing industry is moving from 32-bit to 64-bit. Apple currently has all their built in apps including the Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat built in 64-bit. 64-bit technology is faster, more responsive and even more secure than 32-bit applications. Now that Drive Genius 3 is 64-bit it will run faster and be able to take full advantage of all the memory in your Mac, resulting in faster scanning, defragging and repairing.
Enhanced Defrag
Adding and deleting files to and from your hard drive will cause the drive to become fragmented. When the OS writes files to the drive, it will look for empty space on the hard drive to write data to. If the space is too small to fit the file, it will write part of the data in one area and the remaining data to another area of the hard drive. This way no disk space is wasted. However, this will cause the drive to slow down as it will need to scan multiple parts of the hard drive to locate and read the file. The more writing and deleting that is done to the hard drive, the more fragmented the drive will be. The process will gradually have an impact on the hard drive's performance. This is why using Drive Genius 3 to defragment your hard drive is an excellent way to boost the performance of your computer.
Drive Genius 3 puts all these broken up pieces together into one continuous block with all of the empty space at the end. The Defrag feature displays information in two separate tabs: Volume Fragmentation and File Fragmentation. Volume Fragmentation will display a graphical representation for a quick overview for the files laid across the hard drive. File Fragmentation will display a list of the files that are fragmented on the hard drive. This list will indicate which files are fragmented, how many fragments the file is spilt into, and how much space the file uses.
Enhanced Repartition
Repartition enables you to manage (shrink, expand, shift, delete, hide, reveal or customize) partitions (volumes) on your hard drives. Unlike traditional methods of backing up, erasing and repartitioning the drive, Drive Genius 3 allows you to expand or shrink partitions without erasing them.
Drive Genius 3 is extremely easy to use. In just a few clicks, Drive Genius 3 will defragment and resize your partition to the size of your choice. You can use the Repartition feature to create and delete partitions. Drive Genius 3 includes many custom icons that can be automatically applied to your newly created partition. The Repartition feature can hide partitions from users as well. Last but not least, the feature also has the ability to shift a partition on the hard drive in addition to reconstructing partition maps.
Scan
Scan is designed specifically to verify that every sector (block which can contain information) on your volume or drive can be read correctly. Drive Genius 3 introduces advanced features for performing extended scans and spare bad blocks to assist the hard drive's internal mechanism to properly reallocate bad sectors.
Data on a hard drive is stored in a series of blocks. During normal operation every block of the data should be able to be written to and read from again. However, a hard drive can develop a problem where one or more blocks may lose storage capacity and become unreadable. Surface scanning is a process of requesting a read on every block on the drive in sequence and determining whether the drive reports an error on any of these requests.
A standard scan will count the number of detected bad blocks to inform you of the hard drive's physical sectors. The time required for a Scan test is dependent on the drive's capacity, rotational speed, and the physical state of the hard drive. All the blocks on the hard drive are read in sequential order.
Repair
Repair is a tool for verifying and repairing most kinds of logical hard drive faults. It analyzes the volume for a general overview and can repair/rebuild the volume. It can also be used to fix Mac OS X file permissions on your boot volume. Repair should be run whenever excessive system crashed occur. It also pays to run this periodically as it is not unusual for minor faults to appear on a hard drive. Within the Repair window, there are five functions available to help fix your hard drive. The Repair function offers the following options: Verify • Repair • Rebuild • Repair Permissions • Verify Preferences
Shred
Drive Genius 3's Shred function is used for securely erasing the contents of a volume or the whole drive. There are many reasons to perform a shredding operation instead of simply dragging the files into the trash. For example:
- To avoid identity theft and protect your credit.
- Stop intellectual property theft.
- Permanently get rid of your data files so no one can recover them. For example a volume with adult oriented materials.
- Permanently delete any software that you are not going to be using on your new machine since software licenses usually only apply to one computer.
- Most Government/large corporations require the drives to be securely erased before disposing or transferring to other users.
The only secure way to erase your drive is by overwriting the previous data patterns. Drive Genius 3 has been written to conform to the United States Department of Defense standards for drive sanitation. Shred overwrites the volume or drive with 1 (Zeros), 3 (Random), or 7 pass (DoD) and ensures all previous data will never be recoverable. Drive Genius also features a 35 pass (Gutmann) option, which overwrites every block of data 35 times. Drive Genius 3's Shredder function conforms to the U.S. Department of Defense standard for drive sanitization (DoD 5220.22), and it works with IDE (ATA), SATA, SCSI, USB, and Firewire hard drives. Drive Genius 3 also allows you to permanently erase the free space on your volume making it impossible for anyone to retrieve old files you have previously deleted.
Integrity Check
Integrity Check is a suite of diagnostics designed to test the overall integrity of the disk by writing and reading various block sizes to and from the drive. This test is ideal to see the performance of rapidly writing and reading files over time such as a mailing server. By simulating the reads and writes of data, you can see how your hard drive performs with your data. The options within Integrity Check allow you to choose the transfer sizes of data, the test duration, and the test type.
Sector Editor
Drive Genius 3's Sector Edit allows expert users the ability to access and modify bits and bytes of a file, volume or disk.
Initialize
Drive Genius 3's Initialize feature is the easiest way to prepare a disk for general use. Most hard drives are already formatted at the factory. However, many hard drives are not ready for Mac use. Initialize will:
- Install the Apple driver
- Write a partition map
- Create a new volume and mount it to the desktop
Initializing will wipe out the first few thousand blocks of the drive in order to place a device driver and the partition map on the drive. The rest of the drive is intact, but files that were previously on the drive will not be accessible anymore. If you accidently initialize a drive and it contains information you did not backup, you will need software such as “Data Rescue” to recover the files.
Benchtest
Benchtest is a comparison tool to display the performance of your hard drive against similar or different base machine configurations. Using Benchtest will allow you to see how your machine compares to a base model computer to gauge the performance of your hard drive. If your machine performs below the standards of a base model computer, this may be a sign your hard drive is in need of maintenance such as a Defrag. The display options within the Benchtest allow you to choose the graph type, test type and the comparison machine model.
Clone
The Clone function copies all the information from the source drive to the destination drive. A copy of the source drive is made to the destination, so if you backup your startup drive, a bootable copy of it is created with all information such as file permissions preserved. Unlike most backup programs which copy file-by-file, Drive Genius 2 utilizes a method called device copy. Using device copy enables you to retain every detail of the original drive, from bootability to the icon locations. Device copy is also a lot faster than the traditional file-by-file backup. Drive Genius 3 supports duplication of drives and volumes. for drive copy, Drive Genius 3 will duplicate an identical copy of the drive. For volume copy, an identical volume is first duplicated, and then Drive Genius 3 will apply a proprietary resizing technology to expand the volume size to the maximum, so no space is wasted. Duplication can be used for copying one drive to another drive or to a disk image file.
