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Defrag/Disk Cleanup
- Thread starter Vivid.Inferno
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There is no need to do a defrag because the OS automatically does it for you. There are programs out there that will allow you to manually perform one, but there's no need to.
That is not strictly true. Depending on your work, i.e. if you regularly deal with large files or get down to very low disk space, then there is sometimes a need to defrag the system.
That said the quickest and safest way to do it is to clone to an external, wipe the drive and then clone back to the internal. The disk defrag tools are slow and quite risky in that they can hose a drive very easily. Not to mention they cost money.
Actually...
If you have boot camp at 32GB, and want to expand it with WinClone (which I have done before), then you might need to defrag your disk depending on past usage. I was able to use WinClone on one of my Macs, but I can't do it on the other until I defrag it or back up the disk and restore.
I've seen iDefrag... how is it?
Any other tools?
If you have boot camp at 32GB, and want to expand it with WinClone (which I have done before), then you might need to defrag your disk depending on past usage. I was able to use WinClone on one of my Macs, but I can't do it on the other until I defrag it or back up the disk and restore.
I've seen iDefrag... how is it?
Any other tools?
Duff-Man says (again)....if you search the forum on "defrag" you will see just how many times this has been asked/answered....oh yeah!
Completelly disagree. OSX defrags files of under 20mb size. I have tons of bigger files than that. So my answer is, it depends. If you dont have many files above 20mb, then you propably dont need to defrag. For my situation, im very satisfied with iDefrag, i defrag my drive every now and then, and i can tell that it boosts speed a little bit (and no, its not a placebo effect, the first time i defraged i recorded times).
At the risk of beating a dead horse, allow me to jump in here. I have used and owned Macs since 1989. Over this time, I have optimized my hard drive with such tools and Symantec Utilities for the Macintosh, TechTools Pro, and Norton Utilities for the Macintosh. I have benchmarked my system before and after optimization. When I came to work for my current firm, I found that my Mac-using secretary had never performed any kind of maintenance on her computer. I cleaned it up for her.
Long story short--On none of these computers did optimization or other routine maintenance improve performance by more than 2-3% as measured by benchmark utilities. Suffice it to say, there was no improvement that could be seen just by looking.
Windows ships with system maintenance software including a defragging utility. The improvement in performance that it makes is dramatic.
Except for Disk Utility, MacOS X does not ship with GUI-based system maintenance software. [Commandline File System Check (fsck), a Single User Mode task, served a useful purpose before Apple added journaling to HFS+.] To the contrary, Apple explicitly warns MacOS X users against using defragging software on MacOS X hard drives. It is advice well heeded.
Flogging expired equines is one of the great joys of these boards.
I am curious, in what way has journaling made fsck obsolete? I would also like a link to Apple's warning against defragmenting a drive. (FWIW, the former I keep in my arsenal; the second I never do.)
I have plenty of files that are bigger than 20mb and I never defrag, nor have I ever defragged any of my Macs. I'll just keep letting the operating system take care of my hard drives rather than me try and do it myself.
Thank you.
Nope. The rebuilt directory you get from DiskWarrior is just that -- a reconstruction of the index of where files are located on your drive. Defragmentation reorders the files themselves into consecutive data blocks on the drive, which makes reading them more efficient.
I see, thanks for clarifying. I misunderstood, mainly because the build graph option gives the impression that the activity does what you refer to above....
Regards,
Bill
That's a great idea if you run Vista, which does full automatic defrag. OS X only does it for files less than 20MB, and not at all for free space.
One of the best files to defrag in 10.5+ is the Safari cache. It gets up to 180MB, and fragments pretty heavily. It is also good to run sqlite3 Cache.db VACUUM on the file. You can defrag the file using this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/5053757/
I also endorse the disk clone defrag method.. it works great. So does a full Time Machine system restore to a freshly formatted disk(except Time Machine doesn't do caches; they get wiped and start fresh). iDefrag also works.
Don't feel alone- DW does indeed give the impression that it is indicating a full system defrag when it reports 0.00% "files out of order" or something of that nature. If you ever run a true defragmentation program it will suddenly make sense that DW isn't doing that just by the time required to do an actual defrag compared to the few seconds it takes DW to make a graph though!
It was not my intention to imply that journaling made fsck obsolete. That said, prior to the addition of journaling to HFS+, fsck was the only utility that ever fixed an identifiable problem on my MacOS X hard drive. Since the advent of HFS+ Journaled, fsck has never found a problem on either of my Power Mac G5s' hard drives to fix.
Here.
Thanks... you know, I never made the connection, but I think you may be correct. Since journaling, I haven't seen fsck detect any disc errors.