Prosoft Engineering, Inc. has announced the release of Drive Genius 3.1 with Live Defrag
“We are excited to release this new version of Drive Genius 3 that no longer requires users to boot from the DVD or a second drive to use the Defrag function for the boot drive,” says Greg Brewer, CEO of Prosoft Engineering, Inc.
The Defrag feature is one of the most popular, award-winning features that Drive Genius 3 offers, but booting from the DVD has long been one of the cumbersome steps involved to defrag. Now users can simply install it as an application and efficiently begin improving the performance of their hard drives. Drive Genius 3.1 also comes on a bootable DVD which incorporates Apple s latest boot technology which now supports all the newest machines from Apple.
Features in Drive Genius 3
DrivePulse
Monitors the overall health of your drive, alerting you to possible issues before they become major problems. > More
64-bit
Runs as a 64-bit application on Mac OS 10.6 or later with a compatible 64-bit processor.
Enhanced Defrag
Provides even better defragmentation of your files and even more fragmentation information in a new user interface.
RAID Support
Support for hardware RAID and Apple’s software RAID.
Enhanced Repartition
Add, delete, hide, expand or shrink OS X partitions so you can organize your drive more efficiently.
Scan
Realtime bad-block scanning and an extended block verification that stress tests the read/write validity.
Email Notifications
E-mail notifications can be sent when long-running tasks complete and you are away from your computer.
As a longtime Drive Genius fan, I would say that the new ability to run defrags without having to boot from an optical disk is a huge positive development.
Benefits of Defragmentation
There are two types of fragmentation that can occur on a hard drive:
• Free Space Fragmentation
• Data Fragmentation
Free Space Fragmentation is a natural occurrence where the contiguous free space of a new drive becomes separated over time. As files are created, written, and deleted on the hard drive, there is less consecutive free space to write a complete file. The once large block of free space becomes fragmented into many smaller blocks of free space. This occurrence leads to data fragmentation because files have to be broken into multiple pieces to fit into the smaller free blocks. As the drive use nears capacity, both types of fragmentation become more pronounced.
Data Fragmentation occurs on a hard drive when there is not a block of free space large enough to contain the complete file. This causes the data to be split into separate pieces as it is written to the hard drive; which causes slower access time. When accessing the file, the hard drive has to search for each individual piece of data instead of accessing one large contiguous chunk. This affects all files, including system files and application files, which can lead to slow boot times and slow application launches. Note well however, that slow access times due to fragmentation are greatly reduced when using SSD drives; thus, defragmentation becomes less beneficial.
Mac OS X Defragmentation
Mac OS X automatically minimizes the potential for fragmentation by writing new data to the largest available free space block; however, this optimization is dependent on external factors such as outstanding writes to the disk. Files can still be fragmented when they are opened multiple times even if a large enough block of free space exists to contain the complete file.
Mac OS X will automatically defragment files that meet the following conditions:
• The file is less than 20 MB in size
• The file has more than eight fragments
• The file is not in use
If all of these conditions are met, the file is defragmented when it is opened for the first time. With all the restrictions, the number of files that are candidates for On-The-Fly defragmentation is relatively small. Almost all application and system files (because they are in use) and all large files like video, audio, raw photos, databases, etc. (because of their size) are excluded even though these files are more likely to benefit from defragmentation.
Drive Genius 3 Defragmentation
Drive Genius 3 addresses both free space and data fragmentation on a hard drive. The Defrag feature in Drive Genius 3 reorganizes the fragmented pieces of all files, no matter what their size or fragmentation level, and compacts their content into one contiguous block for optimal access times. In addition, Drive Genius reorganizes the files themselves so they exist in one contiguous block. By compacting the files, the free space is returned to one large block for Mac OS X to write new files without data fragmentation.
Defragmenting your drives will lead to faster boot time, faster application launch, and faster access to your large media files, databases, and virtual machine images.
System requirements:
• Intel Processor-based Mac
• Mac OS 10.5.3 or newer
• 512 MB RAM Minimum
• DVD drive
Drive Genius 3 is available for purchase online at:
http://www.prosoftengineering.com
