Defragmenting

[paulinbognor]

Hi All
Still waiting for my Mac Pro to turn up and getting everything sorted before it arrives.

I have read a lot of things about the fact that you don't need to defragment Mac HD. In theory this sounds great but I wanted to double check that this is the case. I'm currently PC based using NTFS formatted HDs on Win XP. I defrag my two main drives every 72 hours and in an average 72 hours there are usually 1500-5000 fragments in files.

So will I just not get the same amount of fragments when working on my Mac Pro? Or is the 'you don't need to defrag' advice aimed at general home users?

Thanks in advance

[gauchogolfer]

OSX takes care of all of that in the background. As long as you leave your computer on overnight, it'll run these kind of system maintenance routines while you sleep. If it's off, it'll run them when it wakes up. I've never defragmented my powerbook's drive.

Edit: Obviously iGary uses his machine at a higher level than me, so I'd follow his advice. For my home/office use, I've never even considered doing it. YMMV.

[iGary]

I use Tech Tool to defrag my drive once every two weeks when I do my other maintenance.

Supposedly, OS X defrags on the fly, but I don't know how much I believe it.

I play around with 220 MB PSD files all day, so its good practice to get things lined up now and then--at least for me.

[WildCowboy]

Do you work with large files? OS X automatically defrags files under 20 MB (I think that's the number) on the fly. But if you frequently work with large files, you might benefit from an occasional defrag using a third-party utility.

Here (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668) is Apple's page on disk optimization.

[paulinbognor]

Thanks for the replies.

I do regularly work on large files (like igary) and I expect that 80% of the files I work on in Photoshop are 30MB-400MBs

Is there a way (without 3rd party software - or free 3rd party software) to check how fragmented the drive is? that way I could run it for a week or so and then see if I to regularly defrag.

[hodgjy]

I bought iDefrag for $30, and it was worth it. I use it for one reason--I use Parallels to run Windows XP. My XP virtual machine is 1.5 gb, and even when I don't do much with it, the file becomes highly fragmented. Using the Parallels Compressor tools defrags the Windows file within the virtual machine, but the OS X file that is the virtual machine is still fragmented, if that makes sense. I notice that when it's fragged, it runs slower. Defragging it every now and then helps. I'm surprised that using it for a week can frag the virtual machine into 50 fragments.