I'm new to the Mac/OSX platform and I haven't seen any mention of a popular disk defragment program yet. Anyone here have some suggestions?
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What disk defragment program do you guys use?
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I was reading that once the disk reaches around 80% full things start slowing down and a disk defrag program becomes neccessary even for OSX.
Part of the reasoning that I think that could be right is that there isn't as much space for virtual memory then. But I've never read that anywhere. Someone might have more knowledge on that than me.
I use iDefrag, though defrag is not really necessary unless your working with large files (I think it's over 40MB). OS X does have a built-in defragmenter, but even that needs a little help sometimes.
From the horse's mouth, so to speak, and for what it's worth:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668
You only have to worry if you get down to 1GB or so available space so the OS can create new swap files if it needs to. OS X creates swap files in 80MB increments so even 1GB of available space should be fine.
Wow...it's the day of defrag. A similar question was last asked an hour ago.
Basically, unless you work with large files (like heavy video editing), there is no real need to defrag, as the OS automatically does it for small files.
Basically, unless you work with large files (like heavy video editing), there is no real need to defrag, as the OS automatically does it for small files.
Mac's automatically defrag small files but large files (>50MB or so) can still get fragmented, assuming you keep a decent backup it is actually quicker to just reformat your HD and restore it from backup than it is to run a defrag. (And it's pretty painless compared to windows too.)
I love how people think that...
Personally, I boot from an external drive and use iDefrag. It's the only one that cleans up the extents and btrees too.
And what's wrong with that? It happens to be true.
This is incorrect.
OS X (Tiger/Panther specifically, things were different in pre-10.3*), creates dynamically sized swap files.
And they are based on normal computer bit sizes, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1024MB.. I've never seen them get any larger than 1GB.
Code:
ls -lh /var/vm
total 2097152
drwx--x--x 20 root wheel 680B Oct 17 10:29 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M Oct 27 17:01 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M Oct 31 12:05 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 128M Oct 31 15:46 swapfile2
-rw------T 1 root wheel 256M Nov 1 15:01 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 512M Nov 1 15:28 swapfile4And I would not suggest allowing your disk to fill to the point where you have 1GB left. If you have that little an amount of disk space, invest in an external drive or delete some pr0n.
*: Pre-Panther swap sizes were static. I don't remember the exact sizes, but I think they were all in 64MB increments.
I've had Macs since the late 80's and have never defragged the HD. I do photo editing and digital artwork and have never had a problem. It's just another urban legend developed by Windows users and more so these days since more and more Windows users are going Mac.
Having said that I had to defrag my HD for the first time last night... that is the Windows XP partition created from Bootcamp
Having said that I had to defrag my HD for the first time last night... that is the Windows XP partition created from Bootcamp
I've had Macs since the late 80's and have never defragged the HD. I do photo editing and digital artwork and have never had a problem. It's just another urban legend developed by Windows users and more so these days since more and more Windows users are going Mac.
Having said that I had to defrag my HD for the first time last night... that is the Windows XP partition created from Bootcamp
I would defrag in OS 9 just because it was part of the series of checks that Norton ran on the computer whenever I had issues, which seemed to be quite often.
Except... do they have a product to sell you? TechToolPro prehaps?
Does it include a defrag util perhaps? Oh it does?
Does it seem in their best interest to post something like this? Perhaps?
Sorry, it's the cynical color in me. Yes, this article comes up a lot (it used to be a forum post, if I remember correctly).
Ultimately, it's up to the user. A defrag ISN'T necesary. As noted in the article disks are so fast, that a defragged disk sometime only has the PERCEPTION of being "faster". But if you WANT or think you NEED a defrag, AFAIK, there's TTP and iDefrag out there. That's all.
This is why we back up, no? If one has a good back up, there's no need to care about recovering data from a fragmented disk that go bad.