Disk defragmenter

[stephanie]

What is a good program(s) that would allow me to defrag my Mac hisk drive? It is on HFS+ if that makes a difference.

 

[KingArthur]

Norton Speeddisk, all the way. I use norton utilities all the time on my mac. It works for HFS and HFS+ formats, and it does an excelent job. You boot from a CD usually and then you can defrag all of the system files, too, and put them in the right parts of the disk (unlike on a PC where you have to be running from the HD, therefore can't defrag the system files). Definately recomended. I have used various versions of it for years and I love it. It works great!

 

[stephanie]

I will look at Norton Speedisk, but isnt there a program out there I could run from the hard disk like Windows? That feature never bothered me, and I then dont have to worry about a CD getting lost or damaged.

 

[Chisholm]

You can install it as an application just fine. I think you only have to boot from the cd when disk doctor finds certain errors it can't fix while booting from the hard drive. Its a great product!
cheers!

 

[Phipple]

There is a way to defragment the files as you can do on a PC.

Back up the drive, then partition it into at least two. Copy your files back onto one of the partitions, then drag the system folder from one partition onto the other. Then load Norton onto each partition.

You could then boot from either partition by using the startup-disk control panel, and run Norton on the disk that didn't boot. You would never need the Norton CD again.

 

[FattyMembrane]

there have been about 10 threads on defragmenting in the last few months, just do a search and you'll find them. people get way to concerned with defragmenting and repair. fragmenting is not that big a deal on the hfs+ filesystem and as long as you keep about 1-2gigs of the drive free and have enough ram to keep page-outs to a relatively infrequent ocurance, you should not have any noteworthy defragmentation issues. windows tends to fragment itself quite often and easily, as well as requiring lots of disk repair. under osx, you shouldn't have too many crashes (if any at all) and any problems with the filesystem are corrected when you boot the machine (and now you can enable journaling if you are that concerned about your hd). people need to get out of the habbit of running disk utilities and defragmenters every week because they think that it's necessary. it's not necessary, one of the good things about unix is that it's built to be stable and low-maintainence. defragmenters for the mac are kind of a placebo, since anyone who would cause serious defragmentation (like people using the hd as a scratchdisk for huge video and photo projects) should just erase the disk every so often.