Bumff Yes we know that this sometimes happens,but this ONLY occurs when a large file cannot be moved,OS X does auto defrag for files below 20mb and that is 99.9% of all the files on your hard drive. Maybe you should have found the file first and deleted it before coming on here and spouting off about fanboys
I use my macbook as a media server when I'm at home (summer). So there's a lot of ~200mb - 700mb files getting FTP'd to it and then deleted afterwards.
I know exactly what the problem is, and you're sorta right, it wasn't a "large" file - it was many decently sized files, and when I say "many" - I mean 72Gb worth. I didn't think about that having an affect on that fragmentation but it makes sense. At first I was scared I would have to reformat (don't really have the time for it now) so I posted here - then I started researching. It seems the answer from multiple sources was a defrag and the only thing that popped into my head was my pain in the ass "OS X - the most advanced operating system ever" fan boy friend talking about how macs never need formatting. Me and my other friend tried to reason with him on the fact that they are not magic, despite cool features, and they don't defy physics and not get fragmented - it's a simple fact of a hard drive, as long as hard drives work as they do now, there will always be fragmentation - with any operating system - Linux, Windows, and OS X - but he refused to listen.
That seems to be the common trend with a lot of mac fan boys - only like 25% (my estimation, obviously), only know about their computers, and the other 75% just spew crap about how great it is, how it'll never fail, etc. etc. while never knowing anything about it. As for me, I've used god knows how many flavors of Linux and other UNIX based OS's for awhile, so much of the stuff on the mac that's not GUI isn't a problem for me. OS X is a great operating system, and I love it, but it's not magical, it doesn't defy physics, IMO calling it the most advanced OS ever is a bit of a stretch, maybe easiest to use, don't know "has 1,000,000,000 new features" (99.9% of them which will never be used or have a useful purpose). Though fanboys piss me off (fanboys of anything).
This was a huge break for me in my argument against macs being able to defy physics - even this morning when I was talking to my friend (mac fan boy) - I told him what happened, he said:
It must have been a coincidence, because they don't defrag to which I replied
Then why do programs exist like iDefrag, and the auto mac defragger (which generally works well enough that most end users don't need to worry about fragmentation) to which he said:
To rob decent mac users outta their money
It's the non-knowledgeable unreasoning like that which most fan boys have and which pisses me off - my intention wasn't to come in here bashing them, it was to ask if I was screwed or not - bit of a panic - I need a windows partition on my mac because I need to test some programs' cross-platform abilities for school, which is why I use all 3 (linux, mac, and windows), instead of just one - so I posted here. I was just surprised at defrag being the answer from multiple sources after I've been told countless fan boys who know nothing about the inner workings of leopard about how "
macs will never need to be formatted" - and then on top of that - a defrag fixed my problem - it was quite obvious I was going to mention them as I hate fanboys or radicals of any type, especially the ones that don't know what they're talking about.
I simply didn't think clearly before posting here - I had no intention (originally) of coming in here to blast on fan boys.
