Write 0's is the way to go

[johnnyjibbs]

I have never reinstalled my OS (on Windows or otherwise) and, while those Windows machines have got slower with time, my Mac has done the opposite. My PowerBook is a year old this week and faster than ever. All I do is run MacJanitor about once a month and repair permissions occasionnaly. As it came with 10.2.7 preinstalled, I performed an "upgrade install" to Panther with the Panther up-to-date discs that Apple sent to me complimentary and have then just upgraded when the minor upgrades have been released.

I have no idea what I'm doing with the terminal or anything else, and I don't think the average user should have to worry about that. I leave things as is and I have never had a problem.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Thanks for sharing!

Note to any mac newbies reading, do not format your mac every 4 months!

When I get my avatar, I'm gonna change it to whatever new picture I see you upload, edesignuk.

I second this notion! Reformating is a pain in the butt! Every 4 years is a good amount of time...

 

[Tusk]

Newbs, you will disregard the above suggestion. It's better to refresh your system pretty often versus once every year or two or three.

I'm glad I didn't know that before I switched to mac last month. Otherwise, I would have stuck with Windows. Not near as much hassle.

 

[crenz]

You don't need a entire drive for video scratch, a partition is good enought.
You can wipe the partition instead of the whole drive..

Partitions are good enough to keep things apart from each other, but a separate hard disk can bring a speed increase.

 

[emw]

I have never wiped my iMacs hard drive. It runs like a charm.

It would be interesting to see if someone could do a true performance comparison. Like you, I seldom, if ever, do a complete system rewrite simply because I am too lazy, but if there was any quantifiable benefit in terms of improved system speeds or reduced errors, I may consider it.

 

[jeremy.king]

Newbs, you will disregard the above suggestion. It's better to refresh your system pretty often versus once every year or two or three. You keep the number of old beta/bugs/memory leaks on your system down if you keep refreshing your Hard Drive, whereas if you don't refresh your Hard Drive at least once a year, those problems will stay on your computer and multiply over time, leading to more problems. Anyone that sees more than one refresh per year as irrational and thus refreshes his/her machine not so often is thus being stubborn in his/her method of thinking. If it's due to lazyness or lack of time for not refreshing often, well, that's another story

This is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard. I have yet to refresh/reload/reinstall my Dual 867 and it runs plenty fine. Im curious what old beta/bugs/memory leaks you are referring to. Do you even know what a memory leak is? Its a software problem, and as long as my sytem software is current and my applications are up-to-date - all accomplished with System update, I am fine.

The bottom line is if you are a newb or a veteran, there is no reason to wipe and reinstall once a year. PERIOD. But you should install updates when apple releases them, and you should install updates for software you use, and you should run the daily/weekly/monthly cron tasks or use MacJanitor. But in no case should you reinstall the entire system for sake of doing so.

 

[bankshot]

by the way, the /etc/fstab trick is REQUIRED step in separating user files from system partition - if you don't do it (and just save your documents elsewhere), the system keeps using user library (called ~/Library) on the system drive, which is the #1 reason for system drive fragmentation.

Nah, there's no need to go messing with /etc/fstab. Just a symbolic link from /Users to /Volumes/whatever will do. My user drive is called 'Users' (who would've guessed?) so a quick

sudo ln -s /Volumes/Users /Users

does the trick (after the original /Users has been moved out of the way!).

/etc/fstab is fun for us old Unix geeks, but I seem to recall that OS X doesn't always use it (or perhaps some versions didn't). I've had zero problems with the symbolic link method, and it's probably a little easier for non-Unix people to do.

As for fragmentation, keep in mind that Panther automatically defragments files under 20 MB. So while it doesn't affect large media/data files, it's still doing a pretty good job of keeping the disk tidy. I'd guess the majority of gradual slowdowns are due to issues like prebinding, messed up preferences, launch services bloat, etc.

 

[NusuniAdmin]

With my beige g3 i would reinstall about every 6 months, but thats only because IT DID make it faster. i did not do a full zeroing of the hd, usually just a quick format.

With ibook well...I am not planning on doing it anytime soon. In fact I am planning on getting external enclosure for my 60 gig hd in my beige to install ydl 4.0 on

i would also like to add the only reason i reinstalled that often on the beige was because of that dang hd size limit for the os x partition. Even when i put all my big apps in a seperate partiton the thing still only had like 1 gig (even less usually) of space available (for the os x partion) and as we all know os x becomes a pain when available space is that low. But on average I would reinstall when the space got below 1.7 gigs usually, then id do a full reinstall and stuff and id have roughly 3-4 gigs available...