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Defragmentation on Mac OS X

ventuss

ventuss

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 9, 2011
369
10
Files, particularly large ones, on HDDs usually become fragmented over time if frequently written; periodic defragmentation is required to maintain optimum performance.

How do you work on defragmentation on Mac OS X?
 
I

ItWasNotMe

macrumors 6502
Dec 1, 2012
439
304
Intell said:
You don't. The HFS+ filesystem takes care of it automatically.
Click to expand...

OP said large files; HFS+ will only defrag files less than 20MB (not large IMHO) plus a host of other conditions

If you OP really feels need to defray than try something like iDefrag - offers other options as well such as compacting free space

Note with todays multi-TB drives can take a very, very long time to fully defragment a disk and to do it properly disk needs to be off-line. Only really worthwhile if there are many large files that are very fragmented and are constantly being read.
 
B

Bear

macrumors G3
Jul 23, 2002
8,088
5
Sol III - Terra
I wonder how defragmenting a Fusion Drive would affect the performance of it as defraging a Fusion drive could potentially move hot files off the SSD portion.
 
Intell

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,955
509
Inside
ItWasNotMe said:
OP said large files; HFS+ will only defrag files less than 20MB (not large IMHO) plus a host of other conditions

If you OP really feels need to defray than try something like iDefrag - offers other options as well such as compacting free space

Note with todays multi-TB drives can take a very, very long time to fully defragment a disk and to do it properly disk needs to be off-line. Only really worthwhile if there are many large files that are very fragmented and are constantly being read.
Click to expand...

Post Lion HFS+ will defragment files up to 500GB when idel.
 
GGJstudios

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,545
943
ventuss said:
Files, particularly large ones, on HDDs usually become fragmented over time if frequently written; periodic defragmentation is required to maintain optimum performance.

How do you work on defragmentation on Mac OS X?
Click to expand...
With very few exceptions, you don't need to defrag on Mac OS X, except possibly when partitioning a drive. About disk optimization with Mac OS X
You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X.
Click to expand...

If you're having performance issues, this may help:
 
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