Mac and Disk Tools (Defrag)

[Manzana]

So I'm confused and I need opinions on whether or not it's necessary to defrag mac hd's.

I have a PB that I use a lot for moving large files (1-2 gig) and then delete them. I'm a recent switcher and previously with windows I would defrag my drive frequently (along with chdsk and scandsk).

Is "repairing and verifying permissions" good enough for this (I don't even know what it means!). I would rather not get something like diskwarrior ($100) unless I was sure that it was worth it, and from searching the forums I get a mixed response.

So in short, what do you guys do to keep your hd's optimized?

 

[rdowns]

So I'm confused and I need opinions on whether or not it's necessary to defrag mac hd's.

I have a PB that I use a lot for moving large files (1-2 gig) and then delete them. I'm a recent switcher and previously with windows I would defrag my drive frequently (along with chdsk and scandsk).

Is "repairing and verifying permissions" good enough for this (I don't even know what it means!). I would rather not get something like diskwarrior ($100) unless I was sure that it was worth it, and from searching the forums I get a mixed response.

So in short, what do you guys do to keep your hd's optimized?

1. Use Mac OS X
2. Stay away from Windows.
3. There is no step 3!

Seriously, the OS takes care of defrag for you.

 

[Manzana]

Seriously, the OS takes care of defrag for you.

So do nothing? *twiddles thumbs*
I guess I have to "deprogram" somehow.

 

[Mechcozmo]

In HFS+ (Hierarchieal File System Plus) which is the Mac standard for formatting hard drives, it will auto defrag any files smaller than 20MB. Files that are larger will probably not be fragmentend, because they will be given a large area of free space. Also, remember that applications are really just a lot of dinky files, so that 112MB file size is really a bijillion 1KB files.

 

[FuzzyBallz]

Get Disk Warrior, it's like Norton Utilities for Mac.

 

[ChrisFromCanada]

OS X does its auto defrag at 3:00 AM so make sure that once in a while your pb is on once in a while at that time. There is something your can enter into terminal to get it to do it when you want but i cant find it now..

 

[mklos]

Get Disk Warrior, it's like Norton Utilities for Mac.

TechTool Pro 4 is also a very good solution. Its does do defragging (once you turn off Journaling) among many other utility things. Its saved my life a couple of times with corrupt system files. Whew!

Both are about the same price ($80) and are able to boot from the CD to OS X.

 

[Mechcozmo]

OS X does its auto defrag at 3:00 AM so make sure that once in a while your pb is on once in a while at that time. There is something your can enter into terminal to get it to do it when you want but i cant find it now..

Those are called 'cron' scripts, and are different. They are housekeeping things, which generally have to do with optimization and other mudane tasks.

 

[Sun Baked]

In HFS+ (Hierarchieal File System Plus) which is the Mac standard for formatting hard drives, it will auto defrag any files smaller than 20MB. Files that are larger will probably not be fragmentend, because they will be given a large area of free space. Also, remember that applications are really just a lot of dinky files, so that 112MB file size is really a bijillion 1KB files.

I thought it defaulted to 4KB for large volumes, and was smaller on the small volumes (like a floppy).

But HFS+ is showing it's age, and we'll probably be seeing a new file system sometime soon -- or at least an extended version of it.

 

[iMeowbot]

The "old-fashioned way," disk-to-disk backup and restore, is still an option. Ahnd it forces you to make a backup

 

[Manzana]

yeah, I guess there's really no concensus!