Review: Micromat Protege

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A couple of crashes on my G5 and a major slowdown on my G4 Powerbook scared me a little. Disk Warrior 3 really helped, but I’m still waiting for my boot disc to run it on my laptop. In the meantime, I came to the realization that none of the Firewire drives that I have are bootable, so all of my careful SuperDuper backups would be relatively useless in the event of a major crash. So I did some research and found the Micromat Protégé.

The Protégé is a Firewire jump drive that can boot your Mac, both PowerPC and Intel, and run the Micromat tools. It’s a 1 Gig drive, loaded with the latest version of OS X, Micromat’s Disk Studio, a suite of diagnostic applications and room left over for things like Disk Warrior. The Disk Studio has a directory optimization and repair utility that I ran. When I followed up with a scan in Disk Warrior, it showed a perfectly optimized directory, so I would guess that the built in utilities are sufficient. I got my laptop back up to full capacity and am once again a happy camper. Now I have to run some diagnostics on the second drive in my G5, which I think is what was causing my crashes.

People can say what they will about Macs not needing defragging and such. I work with a lot of large files, both video and graphics, and my disks are a mess. I see a very noticeable speed gain when I run these utilities and optimization programs. Even running the default maintenance scripts on a regular basis and repairing permissions once a week helps keep my system running clean and smooth.

The Protégé helps relieve my fear of losing a weeks worth of work time despite my backups. I can boot a dead Mac and diagnose and repair problems now. I can even help out my friends, at least the ones smart enough to use Macs. I think it’s an investment in my peace of mind.

The Protégé is listed on a few reseller sites but only as a pre-order. You can get it directly from Micromat right now, though. Strangely, they didn’t give me a shipping notice, but it showed up at my office in 3 days. A nice surprise. If your Mac is running slow and you don’t have a second disk to boot from, this is cheaper than buying a Firewire drive and an optimization utility. You can still get Disk Warrior on CD for half the price, but with Protégé, you get a great rescue and repair tool at the same time.