Drive 10 1.0.4 for Mac OS X
Company: Micromat, Inc.
Price: $99.95
http://www.micromat.com
The Macintosh community is in a state of limbo, and while many of us are upgrading to Mac OS X, many programs still do not run natively in Apple’s next-generation operating system. This state of limbo is no more evident than with the current state of disk repair utilities. Many of my favorites such as DiskWarrior and Norton Utilities still require you to boot into Mac OS 9 to repair disks. Thankfully, Micromat has come through with the first truly Mac OS X native disk repair utility, and it is great. Drive 10 is polished, easy to use, and is everything a Mac OS X program should be. Though, I would expect nothing less from a company as dedicated to the Macintosh platform such as Micromat.
Start your Engine
Drive 10 is the first native disk repair utility for Mac OS X. It can easily repair any non-boot disks (disks that do not hold your OS X System Folder) within Mac OS X. Drive 10 also ships with a quick and easy CD that you can boot up from while holding down the “c” key. This CD will bring you into an interface much like the Mac OS X installer, with no finder running in the background, and Drive 10 being the only active and open application. From there you can easily repair all of your Mac OS X disks, including your startup drive.
Go ahead, Drive!
Drive 10 does a great job on disks, checking everything from the supply voltage and the read/write buffers to the volume structure and surface of your disk. It has worked great on all four of my Macintosh computers running OS X, including a PowerBook G4/667, PowerMac G4/733, “Pismo” PowerBook G3/500, and a Beige G3/266. In fact, when I first got Drive 10 to review, I ran it on my Pismo and it found numerous problems in my volume structure that Mac OS X’s disk utility (and “fsck -y”) did not find.
Drive 10 also has a handy “Rebuild Volume Structures” command in its “Services” menu, which optimizes the directory and repairs any problems with the volume structure. It’s a great time saver if you do not want to check everything else on the disk, or if you want to squeak every last bit of performance out of your hard disk.
Quirks and Quivers
Ask anyone and they will tell you that I am a truly hard person to satisfy, so it should come as no surprise that I do have a few very minor quirks and quivers about Drive 10. First, I would love it if they would make presets for “fast” and “thorough” checking of your disks, so you do not have to decide what you do an do not want Drive 10 to check. My other quiver with Drive 10 is that when you boot up off of the rescue CD, you do not have full access to a Finder interface and all of your files, as you were able to have with a Mac OS 9 repair utility. I am not sure if this is a limitation by Apple or not, but I would love to have this ability in a future version.
Requirements/Availability
Drive 10 requires any OS X compatible Macintosh running Mac OS 10.1 or later, 64 MB of RAM, and a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive. Drive 10 is available at almost every Macintosh reseller, or from the Micromat web site.
The Summary
I could tell you that Drive 10 is a great utility for Mac OS X users, and I would not be lying. What I am going to tell you, though, is that Drive 10 is a necessary and downright indispensable utility for Mac OS X users. If you use Mac OS X, you HAVE to buy Drive 10.
Drive 10 is everything that a Mac OS X program should be. Its interface is anything but cluttered, and is sleek and easy to use. Best of all, while the program was designed for Mac OS X, it’s core routines come from TechTool Pro, so there is no reason to not trust Drive 10 with your data. My only quiver about Drive 10 is its lack of presets like fast or thorough to simplify and expedite the testing process. That quiver is very minor, though, and I definitely recommend Drive 10. Though it is the slogan that Micromat uses, I simply cannot think of a better one. If you are using Apple’s next-generation operating system, you need a next-generation disk utility.
MacMice Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.