Today I helped a customer that was new to using Drive Genius and had a few questions about the DrivePulse feature. He definitely liked that DrivePulse would monitor his drives and warn him for potential issues. Since he is often transferring data between his hard drives, he was wondering if DrivePulse would run tests while he is moving files and slow down the transfer rates.
I explained to him that DrivePulse will monitor your hard drive daily and will ONLY run when your computer has been idle for 5 minutes. DrivePulse will Scan for physical problems (Bad Blocks) on the disk once a week, which takes about an hour to complete and it will pause the scan if the computer becomes active during a scan. What that means is, the Scan will only occur once a week and will only start when you're not using the computer (off at lunch or stepped away). If at any time during that Scan, you come back and start using the computer again, the Scan will pause and wait till you're not using your computer again.
DrivePulse will also perform a Verify on the volume to assess the integrity of the catalog and directory structure once a day which takes about 2 minutes to complete. This follows the same rules as Scan in that it will ONLY run when you're Mac is not being used and will pause if you start working on your Mac again.
DrivePulse will also scan the volume catalog and its files to determine the amount of fragmentation on the volume, this is scheduled once a week and takes around 10 seconds to complete.
DrivePulse uses heuristics other than inactivity. For instance, if a Time Machine backup is active, or CPU use is high, or an app has put the system in "kiosk" mode, DrivePulse will not run tasks even if the computer is inactive.
He was glad to learn more about how DrivePulse works and that it will only run these tests when he is not using his computer. He will make sure to leave DrivePulse turned ON so it can continue to monitor the health of his hard drive.