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Defrag + World of Warcraft?

S

ScottC2105

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 6, 2007
89
0
Since I got my Macbook Pro back in June, boot times and loading times of apps seems to of gotten longer. I ran iDefrag to see what was going on and the most fragged file was lichking.MPQ which, as most of you may know, is the new World of Warcraft expansion. it is a large file (2.4gb).

iDefrag reported my HDD being 28% fragmented.

My question is, should or do I need to defrag? It has been asked a 1,000,000 times I know but I just can't seem to get a simple yes or no answer anywhere.

Some people say yes, some say no and some say defragging my mac caused a hard drive failure etc..

What are your experiences and opinions?

Thanks a lot!
 
26% fragmentation on a NTFS volume is very very bad. However on a HFS+ or Ext2/3 volume it doesn't really matter.

In no way will fragmentation cause hard drive failure. Defragmention is only useful in OS X if you are trying to partition your drive (say for BootCamp), and your disk barely has enough space for that other partition; then you should defrag to move the files and folders to the beginning of the volume, so the end of the volume as free space for your extra partition.

So that would be a NO, unless you are performing that scenario I specified.
 
Tallest Skil said:
Uh... show me one instance of a yes answer to defragging in OS X.

Don't do it. Don't waste money on things that claim to do it. Don't bother trying to do it yourself. It'll be okay.
Click to expand...

There was a big article in the Macworld magazine in the UK some months back for one :). So that is one no, anyone else :D.
 
alphaod said:
26% fragmentation on a NTFS volume is very very bad. However on a HFS+ or Ext2/3 volume it doesn't really matter.

In no way will fragmentation cause hard drive failure. Defragmention is only useful in OS X if you are trying to partition your drive (say for BootCamp), and your disk barely has enough space for that other partition; then you should defrag to move the files and folders to the beginning of the volume, so the end of the volume as free space for your extra partition.

So that would be a NO, unless you are performing that scenario I specified.
Click to expand...

A lot of people have said that :). What would you suggest in forms of settings or software to "optimize" my mac?
 
Steve Jobs has not defeated the laws of Computer/Information Science. OS X does not defrag files bigger than 20MB, and it doesn't do free space defragmentation.

If you want/need to defrag, you have two solid choices, and a third less solid choice:

1) iDefrag - I have it, it works.
2) Disk Utility to clone your drive to another drive. The cloning is done at the file level, so the copy is defragged.
3) less-solid: Do an Erase & Restore with your Time Machine from the OS X boot DVD. The restored system is defragged, except cache files, which aren't restored at all. Also risk that you didn't have a 100% backup.

BONUS METHOD: (Defrag one file)

This is the method I use in my script to defrag Safari cache on 10.5. It works for any file.

In Terminal, change to the directory with the file you want to defrag.

ls -l lichking.MPQ
dd if=lichking.MPQ of=copy.dat bs=32768k
mv copy.dat lichking.MPQ
ls -l lichking.MPQ

VERIFY that the ownership and permissions of lichking.MPQ are the same as when you started. Frequently, the owner will be wrong. "chown rightowner lichking.MPQ" should fix you, where rightowner is the new owner.
 
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