Drive Pulse® is part of the Drive Genius 3 utility for Macintosh computers. Using Drive Pulse® is like having a heart monitor on your computer. There are several things that this software monitors, working to keep your machine from crashing and averting drive recovery problems. The utility waits in the background, waiting to go to work when your Mac is idle. It then jumps into action, performing important checks to determine the health of your drive. When a problem is found, it calls upon the other features of Drive Genius 3 to make repairs and perform cleanup operations.
Drive Pulse® monitors for physical problems by performing scans to search for bad blocks on the hard drive. This ensures the physical integrity of the drive. The scan takes about an hour to complete and is scheduled to run weekly. All DrivePulse scans are ONLY run when your Mac is idle, meaning you’re not currently using it. If you come back to your Mac while a scan is running, the scan is put on hold. This allows for minimal impact on your workflow, while still protecting you with automated checks.
Drive Pulse® will also scan the drive, checking the integrity of the catalog and director file structures. This scan takes about two minutes to complete. The volume consistency check is scheduled to run on a daily basis.
Volume fragmentation causes your computer to boot slowly, slows down the opening of programs and can cause access to large files, such as audio and video, to balk. While the Snow Leopard OS does some file defragmentation, Drive Pulse® scans the entire drive and sends the defragmentation routine in Drive Genius 2 into action. The fragmentation scan takes about ten seconds to complete and is scheduled to run weekly.
Drive Pulse® is designed to run on 64-bit Macs. For Windows data recovery, check out Data Rescue PC3.