There are quite a lot of mac cleaning tools out there at the moment. The competition is big, and almost every software developer tries to add more unique features to their app or combine different kinds of tools to make their product more comprehensive. Drive Genius 5 also combines two big types of tools for a safe and fast Mac work – it offers both cleaning set of tools and protection from malware and viruses.
Drive Genius offers a pretty extensive features set: It supports PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, it fixes a slew of issues that otherwise would keep your Mac from working, formats and partitions. Drive Genius 3 is the best Mac hard drive utility for the Mac platform. Optimize your Mac hard drive with Drive Genius 3. Yes, this was the same product used by Apple at the Genius Bar to defrag your Mac hard drive and speed up your Mac!. Traditionally, Mac hard drive maintenance and management has been difficult, time-consuming and confusing.
Prosoft Drive Genius – The Cleaning Part
Driver genius free download - Drive Genius, Genius, Digidesign CoreAudio Driver, and many more programs. Get USB WebCam drivers for Mac OS X. Free to try User rating. Publisher: IOXperts. Also by Prosoft, Drive Genius is a comprehensive hard drive utility. It can be used to verify and repair disk directory structures; it can also be used to rebuild directory structures from badly corrupted disks. Like most third-party tools, Drive Genius provides a better chance of recovering corrupted disks than Disk Utility.
In all, if you download Drive Genius 5 (or upgrade from earlier versions), you can explore through 3 Modules – Protect, Speed Up and Clean Up. We’ll talk about the Protect one a bit later; for now, let’s focus on the cleaning and speeding parts.
The Speed Up module offers you two features:
- Defragment – you can learn more about this process here. (The feature is not available on macOS High Sierra (10.13) or higher)
- Speed tab claims to measure your optimal drive performance.
The Clean Up module has 8 different tools to try. Here is a short sum up on each of them.
- Repartition – Repartition – this feature shows you all of your Mac partitions and offers you to organize or delete them in order to optimize the space. (The feature is not available on macOS High Sierra (10.13) or higher)
- Find Duplicates – this tool looks for identical files that may clutter your system.
- Find Large Files – this is a useful feature that allows you locating all the big files on your Mac. Good chances are that you don’t need many of them.
- Clone– this feature figures out the configuration of your drive and copies it to the new drive.
- Secure Erase deletes the data with no possibility of recovery.
- Initialize– this one works with preparation of new drives or deleting the old ones (can be used to prepare a drive for work with Windows or different camera cards).
- IconGenius™ – here you can choose an icon for any folder or drive.
- Information– this tab gathers all of the information you may need to find on your Mac’s system.
Drive Genius for Mac – The Protecting Part
Macs have always had the reputation of well secured devices that do not need any additional antivirus programs. However, such programs (free or paid) for OSX do exist and people do install them. It is not surprising, as you can only be amazed by the skills of modern hackers and the number of nowadays scams and viruses that potentially can affect Macs, too.
The fact that there have been a considerable amount of viruses and security issues only tells us that some kind of protection wouldn’t hurt. The last security flaw stroke not long ago, with the update to High Sierra. Maybe you didn’t notice it, as Apple was fast to fix it, but for some time, anyone could log in to your system without any passwords.
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Drive Genius 5 claims to protect you from all the possible issues. By exploring the Protect module, you can see what features it offers.
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- Malware Scan – when you run Malware Scan, it looks through all of your files in search for all the currently known malware. The list of such malware is updated on the daily basis. Additionally, this feature automatically looks for malware in all of your downloaded files.
- BootWell – this tool builds up an additional startup drive in order to optimize or fix you primary drive (needed for repair, defragment, advanced physical check, etc.)
- Physical Check – this feature aims to check and fix different hardware issues connected to damaged drive and cable or connection problems.
- Instant DrivePulse – it performs basic DrivePulse operations and tells you if there are problems.
- Active files – this feature shows you files and programs that are active at the moment.
- Consistency Check – this one looks through formatted drives and makes sure there are no errors and data issues.
- Repair – this tool is able to fix the majority of logical file problems.
- Rebuild – this feature can find the lost file names if the data is not removed.
The Pricing
The program offers a free demo. The download link is provided by email with a unique demo key. With the demo up and running you can test out available features for up to 30 days. Drive Genius 5 app is not free and requires a one-time payment. There are three plans you can choose from.
- Standard - $79
- Standard With BootWell© Drive - $94
- Professional - $299 (annual fee)
How to Uninstall Drive Genius
Drive Genius For Mac
There are quite a lot of inquiries on Mac forums from people who have problems uninstalling Drive Genius. If you decide to remove this app, too, here are your options.
First option is to do it manually. First of all, stop all the processes of Drive Genius (with the help of Cmd+opt +Esc; choose Drive Genius and click on Force Quite). Then, drag-and-drop the app to Trash and confirm uninstalling. Then it is recommended to go through your files and to manually delete all the data associated with Drive Genius. Be sure you delete the following, if they are still there:
- - /Users/Library/Preferences/com.prosofteng.DriveGenius2.plist
- - /Users/Library/Application Support/DriveGenius
- - /Users/Library/Preferences/com.prosofteng.DGAgent.plist
Second option is to use a special app. This option is much faster and easier. All you need to do is to use a cleaning app with an uninstalling feature. MacFly Pro can handle it very quickly for you.
Conclusion
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Drive Genius 5 is a great tool for managing Mac’s hard drive and its partitions. The set of provided features is rich but very narrow and you will yourself rarely using them on the regular. App’s design feels outdated and even confusing at times which can be a deal-breaker for some. If you don’t mind spending money on such a tool, it is a decent choice. It is recommended to check out the demo version before you make up your mind.