I have always partitioned my PowerBook’s hard drive, usually with 80 percent dedicated to my production environment and around 20 percent reserved for software testing and general dorking around. The benefit to partitioning your HDD is that you can safely install beta software on the “spare” partition without compromising the integrity of your main (“production”) partition. The down side is that if you ever need to re-partition you drive, you’ve got to back everything up, then “nuke and pave” the drive (to borrow an old friend’s saying). This re-format and re-install exercise can take the better part of a day. Read More…
I have always partitioned my PowerBook’s hard drive, usually with 80 percent dedicated to my production environment and around 20 percent reserved for software testing and general dorking around. The benefit to partitioning your HDD is that you can safely install beta software on the “spare” partition without compromising the integrity of your main (“production”) partition. The down side is that if you ever need to re-partition you drive, you’ve got to back everything up, then “nuke and pave” the drive (to borrow an old friend’s saying). This re-format and re-install exercise can take the better part of a day.
ProSoft Engineering’s Drive Genius helps to maintain, manage and optimize your hard drive and is the Mac OS X equivalent of Partition Magic for the PC. Translation: it lets you repartition your hard drive without re-formatting!
From the Web site:
“Drive Genius is an OS X utility designed to provide unsurpassed storage management. Featuring an easy-to-use interface, Drive Genius is packed with powerful tools such as a drive optimizer, a comprehensive repair facility for analyzing, repairing and rebuilding volumes, plus excellent testing capabilities with media surface scanning, performance benchmarking and data integrity checking. It can be used to initialize drives, create and delete partitions, and erases them securely as per Department of Defense’s standard. Drive Genius can also hide partitions and duplicate volumes or drives swiftly. Last but not least, Drive Genius features advanced tools for resizing and moving of volumes without reformatting, and sports a sector editing tool to modify the data on any sector of the drive — powerful features that will satisfy even the seasoned Mac experts.”
I have always envied the ability of PC users to re-partition drives on-the-fly and no longer have to deal with reformatting my entire Mac OS X hard drive thanks to Drive Genius – and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the many other features of the application, including: a drive optimizer, repair facility, testing capabilities, performance benchmarking and data integrity checking.
I am awarding Drive Genius an O’Grady’s PowerPick for its amazing work as a drive re-partitioner. Drive Genius is available now for US$99 from ProSoft Engineering.
