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 If you've watched enough American crime dramas you'll know that the forensic computer team can read deleted emails, track your web browsing history for the last 10 years and deduce that your neighbour's cousin twice removed is guilty, all by looking at your computer's hard drive.
Well, maybe not, but it is true that just tossing a document in the Trash and choosing 'Empty' from the 'File' menu doesn't actually wipe all traces of it from your computer.
And if your attempt to write the world's greatest poem is so embarrassing you just couldn't bear anyone to read it, then Prosoft's Drive Genius can help. The Shred command claims to conform to the U.S. Department of Defense standard for drive sanitization. This would be particularly useful if you're planning on disposing of your computer, to truly delete all those old passwords, credit card numbers and perhaps sensitive client information. Additional comments by Ben Campion The power
Drive Genius is comprehensive software which lets you scan your internal or external hard drives for problems, benchtest a drive against other known systems, check the integrity and repair permissions. You can also perform tasks such as defragmenting, repartitioning and duplicating, sector editing, shredding your data and initialising the disc. Many of these tasks can totally destroy your data if you don't know what you're doing. Because Prosoft's Drive Genius is so powerful, you should read the manual, approach it with a clear brain and always read what's on the screen before pressing the Start button. 
Up with the times
My copy of the CD arrived just before I upgraded to Tiger. Knowing that this class of utility software can wreak havoc if used with the wrong operating system I made sure to check for and install updates before I started using it. I also had a good look at the PDF manual. As a further precaution I dug up some spare external hard drives and loaded them with copies of a variety of files, folder and applications, rather than experimenting with my precious original data. A loose cable and a constrained working space which meant the external drive was often accidentally disconnected when it shouldn't have been provided a further "test". That's just the kind of real-life situation in which problems can be created. Do sweat the small stuff
It's a bit annoying then that the Help button available on pretty well every screen opens a comprehensive PDF file, but not to the relevant information. Instead you need to scroll or use the PDF's own Search function to reach the help you were looking for. On software like this the Help should be context sensitive. If I'm on the screen for Shredding then the Shredding help should be at my fingertips. The Drive Genius icon is an attractive design made up of 3 interlocking ovals to represent an atom. It's used on each screen for one of the buttons, while a large red dot is used for another button. Their use is inconsistent though. On the Scan window the logo starts and the red button stops and closes. On the Details screen and a completed benchtest screen the logo closes. If atom "means" start then it shouldn't also be used to mean "close". I think it's also fair to say that red is generally used as a cautionary colour and would be better applied to the buttons which are about to start a potentially dangerous action, such as shredding or initialising, rather than the totally safe cancelling and closing. These are tiny points, but they betray an inattention to detail in the interface. Ben comments...
Like a lot of Mac OS X software, installing Drive Genius was an easy drag-and-drop to your Applications folder from the disk image. After playing around for a few moments, my first impression of the application was it has a fairly unattractive interface. The main window is divided into three main areas: a list to select the volume or device to perform an operation, an information area, and an area of buttons (the 'toolbar') where you select the operation you wish to perform on the selected volume/device. Clicking one of the main buttons spawns yet more windows. A similar irritation is how devices and volumes are listed. Suppose you have an external drive partitioned into two sections. This is one device with two volumes. The list of devices will show your internal drive and the external drive with a solid grey behind one and a patchy grey behind the other. Neither is selected, though it looks as though the internal drive is. Select the external drive and it highlights in your system colour. Now switch to the volume view and the selection is lost (and seems to revert to the first item in the list). I spent quite some time on a scan of my 80Gb internal drive while I *thought* I was scanning the 2Gb external drive because of this inconsistency. Anyone would be a fool to go ahead and do something destructive like shredding data without double and triple checking before pressing the button, but this little forgetfulness made me very nervous. The whole notion of having devices listed in one view and volumes in another seems very wasteful to me. In Apple's own Disk Utility the devices are listed aligned to the left and then volumes are listed below the device they belong to an indented a little to the right. A similar technique could make Drive Genius a little friendlier.  Ben comments...
It's easy enough to find your way around the application, and you can navigate fairly quickly, but the whole interface has an uneasy and confusing feel to it. For example, if you insert another disk whilst you're using Drive Genius, you have to click a giant blue "Rescan" button for the volume to show up -- if disks can mount automatically in the Finder, why do I have to do it manually in Drive Genius? As I got more and more used to the interface as I became more experienced with the software, but a Mac application should be easy and fun to use, especially for a $99 U.S. application.
Another small point: if I'm working on a drive and can erase it or shred the data or check it, I'd really like to be able to also name or rename it from within the software. It seems a strange omission that I can't do these things. On the other hand, initialising the drive left me with a volume called DriveGenius.  The big stuff
I started with the safest tasks: some scans, checks and benchtests. They were swift and easy, and the accompanying Help explained how to carry them out and what they were about. My little 2Gb Firewire drive was very co-operative and allowed me to see the full power of this very capable software.
It was very easy to defragment and repair the drive and a delight to be able to repartition it while keeping the data intact. There were many options for changing partition sizes and moving partitions around. This gave me hopes for being able to unpartition a drive in my older Titanium Powerbook, but being able to merge partitions is still being considered for a future release, according to the Help file. An attempt to shred the drive brought up an alert warning me this action could not be undone. I confirmed and the shredding proceeded. This alert was good, but could be made even more useful by repeating the name of the drive I was attempting to shred. "Are you sure you wish to proceed?" could be reworded to "Are you sure you wish to shred [drive name]?' It's worth noting that Disk Utility, shipping with Tiger, now offers the possibility to overwrite data 7 times or 35 times (See the Erase tab - Security Options).  Ben comments...
I performed a thirty-minute integrity test on my near-kaput Zip disk, and was able to view a bar graph and a line graph of how my disk performed. Despite the awkward interface of the software, I can see that Drive Genius does have some interesting and unique features, and I can see how this feature might be of use for data archival, or storage in a network environment. This function has a variable specified time limit, and you can specify up to a twenty-four hour integrity check for extreme accuracy in your test results.
Other features include a Defragmentation tool, which seems to me to be very basic, offering only a simple graphical portrayal of the arrangement of data on a disk. Like the majority of other functions within Drive Genius, it requires your volume to be un-mounted for it to be defragmented, thus precluding the possibility of scanning your start-up drive. Mac OS X Panther has automatic defragmentation built-in to the HFS+ file system for files less than 20 MB in size, reducing the importance and selling-power of this feature.
One neat feature of Drive Genius is the ability to repartition a drive... without formatting or erasing the device in any way. Usually, you must completely initialise the device in order to change the data partitions. I tested this feature on my same battered Zip test disk, and it worked great, if a little non-intuitively. You must resize any original partitions, so you have 'unused space', and then then create another partition from this unused nothingness. Of course, you are moving 'live' data around so you should make a backup of your drive before performing this task. I wasn't in a position to test the Sector Edit feature which is for power users to really get in and sort out a problem drive. My test drives were also too small to test the Duplicate drive feature which apparently makes an identical copy of a volume or device. This is the kind of thing used by law enforcement when they seize a computer and must be able to show their efforts have not affected what's on the drive.  Ben's conclusion
It's my opinion that any modern application should give you a proper error message, such as 'You cannot scan this disk because it is your start-up volume' and that perhaps a PDF file is not the best approach to providing context-sensitive help.
I came to be more and more disappointed as I found my way through Drive Genius that there were no cautionary messages given from the software as you used various aspects of it. The application really is hampered by its user interface and using it felt like driving down the Auckland motorway doing 130 km/hr, wearing no seat belt -- there was the omnipresent potential for fatal consequences. Miraz's conclusion
This is powerful and comprehensive software which does its job well. It's easy to use and the 109 page Help manual contains a lot of detail. The options around partitions are particularly impressive. At almost $200, and given its feature set, this software isn't for the casual user. I'd see the chief audience as being those who make movies or music and users who deal with large databases. There are a couple of features I'd really like to see, such as renaming drives and merging partitions. The interface problems caused me to lose confidence in the software. A thorough overhaul of the interface would be of real benefit in making the software more accessible and usable and in increasing its perceived reliability.
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