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Erase free disk space then defrag.

D

dmc754

macrumors newbie
Original poster
If i erase free disk space then defrag will it improve the speed of defraging, i am using idefrag and have not yet finished a dfrag because it takes so long.

Also which algorithm is the quickest in idefrag.
 
What on Earth do you hope to gain by defragging? Apple explicitly recommends against defragging in all but a few exceptional cases. You are not one of the exceptions. Apple even explain why commercial defragging utilities can make your performance worse. Again why do you want to do this?
 
It is recommended for people with lots of multimedia files to use defrag tools i have over 250GB of video file alone and are stored on a n external drive, hence causing no problems with the OS.

So with cleared lets get back to my original question.
 
No, defragging is not recommended on OS X.

If you really want to, do the longest, most thorough defrag you can.

You'd gain much more performance by upgrading to a faster hard drive.
 
In general, the less files and the more free space you have on the partition, the faster and better a defragmentation works. It might even help to move some big files to a different partition temporarily, and move them back after the defrag is finished.
 
I have thousands of photos, maybe 300GB of media - actually more, I didn't count my iTunes. And I downloaded iDefrag a while ago, did a fragmentation check - 0 fragments. I really see no point of defragmenting HFS+ volumes.
 
dmc754 said:
It is recommended for people with lots of multimedia files to use defrag tools i have over 250GB of video file alone and are stored on a n external drive, hence causing no problems with the OS.

So with cleared lets get back to my original question.
Click to expand...

Who recommends it for multimedia files? Except makers of defragmentation tools?
 
Jethryn Freyman said:
No, defragging is not recommended on OS X.

If you really want to, do the longest, most thorough defrag you can.

You'd gain much more performance by upgrading to a faster hard drive.
Click to expand...

Im on an imac and I'm pretty sure you cannot change the hdd, although i may be wrong so if t is possible please reply.
 
dmc754 said:
Im on an imac and I'm pretty sure you cannot change the hdd, although i may be wrong so if t is possible please reply.
Click to expand...

Doing it yourself requires technical knowledge, and you'll void your warranty.

You can get Apple to do it for a ~$50 charge + the cost of the hard drive, which will also keep your warranty intact. Apple supply 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm drives, iMacs come with 7200 rpm.

You'd have to buy a hard drive from a third party (10,000 rpm or 15,000 rpm), then take your iMac into your local Apple store/authorised repair store and get them to put it in.

On my Macbook Pro, the biggest performance bottleneck I have is the hard drive.
 
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