Prosoft Engineering has released Drive Genius 3, a new version of its popular disk repair utility for OS X.
In addition to its many disk repair and recovery features, Drive Genius 3 introduces a new real-time monitoring system, called DrivePulse, that monitors the health of your hard drives in real time, advising you of any possible issues before they become significant enough to cause data loss or corruption.
If, rather than repair or recovery, you’re looking to take care of some maintenance tasks, the application can help with its Enhanced Defrag and Enhanced Repartition options, which allow you to consolidate the data on your drive to maximize read/write performance and modify your partitions, respectively. Since many of the tasks for which you are likely to run Drive Genius 3 tend to require a considerable amount of time, the application can now be set to notify you via e-mail when a long-running operation is complete.
Drive Genius 3 includes full support for both hardware and software RAID disk arrays and is capable of running as a 64-bit binary. It requires an Intel-powered Mac running OS X 10.5.3 or later and comes in either a personal ($99) or professional ($249) version, which only differ in whether they can be used in a business setting. An optional bootable DVD image can also be downloaded for an additional $5 to help you diagnose and repair boot disks that won’t, well, boot. Owners of a previous version of the software can upgrade to Drive Genius 3 for $49.