Brief Hands-On Report--Drive 10 v1.15 Update

is available for download from Micromat via MacUpdate. Drive 10 was the first third-party hard drive maintenance utility for Mac OS X. MacUpdate lists these improvements:

• Global updates to the application.
• Minor update for Japanese localization.
• Updates for full Mac OS 10.3.x compatibility.
• Updates to the Volume Structure validation and repair routines.
• Updates to the Optimization and Rebuild Volume Structure routines

We downloaded the updater and ran it without problems. However, be sure that the Drive 10 application has not been renamed in any way and is in the location selected in the installer or it won't install. We used the updated version to check our backup external FireWire hard drive. It checked out as fine but the Volume Structures test still took quite a long time to complete for 10 GB data (350,000 files). From our external hard drive we optimized our 4-GB eDrive created by TechTool 4. Afterward it works fine but it is not noticeably faster. Drive 10 works with Mac OS X 10.1 and later. [Dana Baggett]

-- Weekend, May 1-2 --