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Can I defrag a Mac?
- Thread starter vim147
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Well thats it:
Totally confusing and contradictionary advice.
Anyone care to opine a definitive answer?
Though not
I can give you a definitive answer, but someone will call it nonsense...
1. An application that defragments your hard drive can do it quickly and carelessly or carefully and slow. In the first case, you are at a serious risk of data loss if you lose power during defragmentation. And defragmenting a terabyte hard drive carefully without danger will take ages.
2. Spinning hard drives slow down when they are full, for reasons that have nothing at all to do with fragmentation. Solution: Buy a bigger spinning drive.
3. With Fusion drive or an SSD drive, DO NOT DEFRAGMENT. Again due to the way SSD drives work (and Fusion keeps everything that matters on the SSD drive), defragmenting cannot help but will wear out your SSD drive, and confuse any optimisations that the drive does. These drives look at usage patterns and optimise for them. If your drive thinks your typical usage is defragmentation, then you're in trouble.
Defragmentation is for control freaks.
I have been using Macs for audio recording / production since 1995, were talking
"Quadra 900" days !
In those days, the biggest drive I could buy was a 1Gb 10,000 rpm and I needed to
defrag it on a fairly regular basis..... it was recommended.
As far as I was told/understand those drives worked in a VERY different way than they do
now, technically to do with the number of heads/platters and how the data is written.
So while is was perfectly fine and recommended to do that 15 or so years ago, it is
absolutely NOT recommended now, and I don't see any reason to do that with either
a system drive OR an audio drive,
Actually, with the system drive you could easily do serious damage.
Modern drive mechanisms are very different and data is written to the platters by multiple
heads in a very specific way.
Defragmenting and making huge blocks of contiguous data will make the drive work
much harder and possibly cause failure.
Dont do it, as has been stated never fill your drive - I keep a minimum of 1/5th of the
drive empty, this was also recommended and I don't suffer problems since following this
advice several years ago.
If your system drive is a few years in and getting too flu/slow the fresh install is what I
recommend, whenever I have do that it's like having a new computer again
That's my 10 C's on the subject.
Martin.
"Quadra 900" days !
In those days, the biggest drive I could buy was a 1Gb 10,000 rpm and I needed to
defrag it on a fairly regular basis..... it was recommended.
As far as I was told/understand those drives worked in a VERY different way than they do
now, technically to do with the number of heads/platters and how the data is written.
So while is was perfectly fine and recommended to do that 15 or so years ago, it is
absolutely NOT recommended now, and I don't see any reason to do that with either
a system drive OR an audio drive,
Actually, with the system drive you could easily do serious damage.
Modern drive mechanisms are very different and data is written to the platters by multiple
heads in a very specific way.
Defragmenting and making huge blocks of contiguous data will make the drive work
much harder and possibly cause failure.
Dont do it, as has been stated never fill your drive - I keep a minimum of 1/5th of the
drive empty, this was also recommended and I don't suffer problems since following this
advice several years ago.
If your system drive is a few years in and getting too flu/slow the fresh install is what I
recommend, whenever I have do that it's like having a new computer again
That's my 10 C's on the subject.
Martin.
Defrag or frag. . .
Not really necessary, however, you could 'frag' the Mac with proper ordinance
Not really necessary, however, you could 'frag' the Mac with proper ordinance
Could you elaborate further on this statement as pertains to OS X in particular? Feel free to go into some detail. I have a technical background but this is not an area I am very familiar with. I've assumed that there needs to at least be adequate space for whatever virtual memory file the system wants which I notice on my machine is 12 gigs, matching the 12 gigs of memory I have installed.
I had heard an improvement with OS X over Windows was that there is no need to defragment hard drives which certainly works for me. Maintenance of Windows machines was always a pain in the rear. And fragmentation did matter there. World of Warcraft would not run at one point for me in the Windows world until I defragmented the drive - then it was fine. Magic!
By the way, checking my 1 TB drive which has 100 gigs allocated to Windows (where 7 gigs is free) shows I have 27 gigs free on the OS X partition out of 900 gigs. Tell me in detail please why this is badness and what the free space should be for best performance. It does seem slow to me to load up and to load apps, etc. at times.
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It is really funny to me that you just asked this and I see all the posts going one way or the other with no definitive answer. Here is my story and results.
I was having problems with my imac running slowly, much more slowly than it used to and I was getting very frustrated. I then downloaded iDefrag demo and ran it on my late 2007 imac with a 500GB HD. It will show you a graphical representation of the files on the drive with green or grey being good and red being bad or fragmented files. Basically mine was COMPLETELY red. I then downloaded the trial version of Carbon Copy Cloner (which after this looks like I will buy) and completely backed up my iMac to an external drive. I then wiped the iMac clean and used the CCC to replace the contents back on the iMac from the external drive. After it was complete, the "Spotlight" went about re-indexing all the files which took a hour or so. When it was done, programs that took 30 seconds to open only took about 5 seconds to open. The computer is running MUCH MUCH faster now.
I then went and ran the iDefrag after the re-installation to see what it had to say. It showed me 95% of the files were green or grey (not fragmemted) and only 3 little blips of red. The reason is that from what I was told, CCC only puts the files back on in a "contiguous" form so they are not fragmented. Needless to say, I am very happy and my iMac is running much better that the files are not fragmented. The proof that defragmentation is necessary is right before my eyes. I can see it in the performance of my machine. I plan on doing this every time it starts running slow.
I recommend if your machine is running slow, give this a try.