Is mavericks worse at dealing with fragmentation ?

[madeirabhoy]

Never had to defragment my old mini in the 3 years I had it and that was with a 320 gig drive partitioned 200 mac 120 windows or thereabouts. Never even thought about it as was always told that with OS X you didn't have to.


Only had my iMac 6 months. It's internal split 500 each OS X and windows. External drive for movies and stuff. OS X partition always got more than 100 gigs free. Nothing weird done on it. All downloads go onto external.

Noticed drive making a lot of noise. Ran techtools on it. 1000 files fragmented big and small. Biggest contiguous space 2 gigs. Techtools couldn't even run volume optimisation until I moved most of my steam games to the external drive to make enough space.

Few hours later it's almost finished....

 

[Twimfy]

Never had to defragment my old mini in the 3 years I had it and that was with a 320 gig drive partitioned 200 mac 120 windows or thereabouts. Never even thought about it as was always told that with OS X you didn't have to.


Only had my iMac 6 months. It's internal split 500 each OS X and windows. External drive for movies and stuff. OS X partition always got more than 100 gigs free. Nothing weird done on it. All downloads go onto external.

Noticed drive making a lot of noise. Ran techtools on it. 1000 files fragmented big and small. Biggest contiguous space 2 gigs. Techtools couldn't even run volume optimisation until I moved most of my steam games to the external drive to make enough space.

Few hours later it's almost finished....

I seriously doubt any major changes have been made to the way the file system works in 10.9

The general rule of not messing with HDD fragmentation in OS X still stands to be honest. It just isn't needed.

I'd download Smart Utility http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php and use it to see if the drive has any signs of failing.

 

[madeirabhoy]

I seriously doubt any major changes have been made to the way the file system works in 10.9

The general rule of not messing with HDD fragmentation in OS X still stands to be honest. It just isn't needed.

I'd download Smart Utility http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php and use it to see if the drive has any signs of failing.

i ran disc utility which found nothing, then techtools and all it found was a temperature reading which from googling seems to be something techtools throws up more often than not, but the drive passed fine. no bad sectors, nothing. the drive genius smart automatic test runs fine too. couldnt do anything else with it as its just the demo.

and i agree with you completely about defragmentation not normally being needed, but this was clearly the issue here. techtools brough up a massive list of fragmented files, which were all pretty random, and despite 150 gigs of free space, the biggest contiguous space was 2 gigs. the graph showed a random mess of black and white dots of files and space.

when i first ran techtools, it kept cancelling volume optimisation because there wasnt enough contiguous space to work.


never seen anything like it to be honest. ive only had this mac since august (but have had macs since 1993) and never had a problem with it, and i only noticed a problem probably a week ago, mind you i didnt look at the fragmentation until techtools brought it up.

 

[MisterMe]

...

never seen anything like it to be honest. ive only had this mac since august (but have had macs since 1993) and never had a problem with it, and i only noticed a problem probably a week ago, mind you i didnt look at the fragmentation until techtools brought it up.

Then you need to stop looking. To the extent that your Mac needs defragging, it defrags itself. What is more, defragging tools generally do not understand the OS X memory map and may make things worse. TechTools Pro is very useful for certain things, but defragging is a waste of time.

 

[talmy]

Never defragged a Mac intentionally and I've owned them for 10 years. What fragmentation there is doesn't hurt. The easiest (and probably safest) way to defrag is to clone the drive to an external and then clone it back. The cloning process (using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper!) creates a copy with no fragmentation. When I've done this for drive replacement I've never noticed a speed improvement, so I'd never consider intentionally defragging.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

1000 files fragmented big and small.

1000 fragmented files is absolutely nothing.

Noisy hard drives can either mean something is running in the background accessing your disk, but if you rule that out it could mean impending drive failure, especially if it is a clicking sound.

 

[Merode]

1000 fragmented files is absolutely nothing.

Noisy hard drives can either mean something is running in the background accessing your disk, but if you rule that out it could mean impending drive failure, especially if it is a clicking sound.

Agreed, noisy drives are either defective, dying or low quality. Fragmentation means nothing here.. Better start making backups.

 

[maflynn]

Noticed drive making a lot of noise.

What does the smart status say in the Disk Utility? As others stated this may be your culprit, i.e., a drive that is failing.

 

[madeirabhoy]

What does the smart status say in the Disk Utility? As others stated this may be your culprit, i.e., a drive that is failing.

there were no problems with either disk utility or drive genius.



fact is, after a complete defragmentation, all has been fine since. working faster, no noises.

 

[Fishrrman]

[[ and i agree with you completely about defragmentation not normally being needed, but this was clearly the issue here. techtools brough up a massive list of fragmented files, which were all pretty random, and despite 150 gigs of free space, the biggest contiguous space was 2 gigs. the graph showed a random mess of black and white dots of files and space. ]]

All those replies that say "defragging isn't necessary" -- are you going to believe them, or what you can see with your own eyes when you use TechTool?

My suggestion:
Defrag the drive.
Then get back to us with any performance differences you find, before vs. afterwards.

 

[MisterMe]

[[ and i agree with you completely about defragmentation not normally being needed, but this was clearly the issue here. techtools brough up a massive list of fragmented files, which were all pretty random, and despite 150 gigs of free space, the biggest contiguous space was 2 gigs. the graph showed a random mess of black and white dots of files and space. ]]

All those replies that say "defragging isn't necessary" -- are you going to believe them, or what you can see with your own eyes when you use TechTool?

My suggestion:
Defrag the drive.
Then get back to us with any performance differences you find, before vs. afterwards.

This is a non-sequitur.

The most effective disk repair tool on the Mac is File System Check. It is invoked by typing fsck -fy at the command prompt in Single User Mode.