A great Drive Genius feature that just doesn’t get as much credit as it should is DrivePulse. DrivePulse™, a utility to automatically monitor the health of your hard drives and volumes from the comfort of your desktop. DrivePulse™ will check for fragmentation, volume errors, and physical issues on your hard drives. This is a low resource process that will quickly test your hard drives when the computer is idle. When DrivePulse™ is on, the DrivePulse™ icon will appear in the top menu bar to quickly view the status of any connected hard drives or volumes. DrivePulse™ will notify you with a prompt if there are any issues with your hard drives. If you are experiencing S.M.A.R.T. Status problems, large amounts of fragmentation, or issues with your volume catalog, a prompt will inform you to take action on your hard drive. DrivePulse runs two distinct, fast tests once per day, and another test once per week. The daily tests take only 10-20 seconds each and are run only once per day, when the computer is idle. If you return to the computer during a test, it is suspended. You will not see any performance change due to these discreet tests being run. The weekly test follows the same rules, ensuring no system performance changes while running. The weekly test only takes a few seconds as well.
Since this feature was introduced in Drive Genius, there have been numerous examples provided by customers.
that mention how DrivePulse helped save their data before a failure. In one case, DrivePulse alerted a customer that their Time Capsule had multiple bad blocks on it and they were able to get a replacement from Apple right before the warranty expired. Drive Genius does not support Time Capsule, however DrivePulse was able to at detect the issue and alert the customer before a failure or dataloss occurred. Drive Genius can be a great way to maintain, optimize and prevent many drive issues before they impact your data.