The Stellar Drive Toolbox from Stellar Information Systems (http://www.drivetoolbox.com/) is an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to optimizing the performance of your Mac's hard drive. It's an all-in-one, pre-crash, hardware maintenance utility that optimizes, protects, manages, repairs, and sanitizes your Mac hard drive volumes.
 


The software is a combination of 13 hard drive maintenance and management tools. The modules include Surface Scan, Drive Initialization, Benchmark, Drive Performance, Volume Repair, Crap Remover, Drive Stats, Free Space Optimizer, Manage Volume, Stellar Shield Raw Data Editor, Wipe and Drive Clone. You could piece together different shareware and freeware tools to fit your particular needs for less.

However, if you like the convenience of having a whole gaggle of optimizing and maintenance tools bundled together, Stellar Drive Toolkit is worth a look. On the other hand, if you find that the Disk Utility apps that comes with Mac OS X fits all your needs, this is one purchase you can skip.
 
Stellar Drive ToolBox is available in both the CD and download versions for single home users, administrators, and technicians. The single home user edition is available for US$99. A demo is available for download.

One of the key features of the Stellar Drive Toolbox is the ability to quickly burn bootable DVDs with the utility set installed. It grabs the appropriate system software from your installed OS to create a boot volume appropriate for your hardware. On the downside, the interface of Stellar Drive ToolBox is kinda clunky and lacking the polish most Mac users prefer.

That said, the Drive ToolBox does offer a single place for drive initialization, cloning, wiping, free space optimizing and more. If ease of use is key to your needs, you'll want to Drive this Toolbox.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

-- Dennis Sellers