Dilemna: To Defragment or Not To Defragment An OS X’s HD?
1 August 2007, Hedi |
First point: Any OS installed on a HFS+ partition (which is the case of OS X) leads the HD to fragmentation. This is a rule, and OS X isn’t an exception.
Second point: OS X has much more files than OS 9 (RIP)
Third point: here is Apple’s opinion on that subject (according to Apple there won’t be big changes if you defragment your HD); OS X Tiger & Leopard automatically defragment some files with a process called: “Hot File Adaptive Clustering”.
Final point: UNIX: defragmentation on UNIX system is useless.
So… Now we have these elements we have to find and answer to this dilemna: meet me after the jump.
OS X is build on UNIX it’s right, but It is installed on an HFS+ partition, so it must be some fragmentation! HFAC? Yes! OS X do not access hundreds of files on the HD it’s right too.
So who needs to defragment (optimize) its HD?
On my opinion, people who edit, modify and work on huge files often: designers, movie edition etc…
They are (on my opinion) the only ones that should optimize their HD from time to time, with known tools like: Drive 10 or TechTool Pro.
Posted in Mac OS X, Macintosh Tips & Help
5 Responses
Remember, it’s just your opinion. Using HD since they first hit the market on both PC and Mac; I’ve never notice any slow down on my Mac HD as I have on a PC. The PC hard drive will get so slow it crawls to load Photoshop, audio, or movie projects. Never and I mean never have I had a problem loading audio, video, or photoshop projects all at once on my Mac Pro. I run OnyX once every six months to optimize my system performance. After running and restarting, I’ve never noticed a difference in load time for my projects like I did after optimizing my PC HD. Thanks for the information.
I do exactly the same thing to optimize my disk performances (of course) a repair of permissions after each update, new application installation
There is also this informative article:
Optimizing Disks is a Waste of Time
http://db.tidbits.com/article/7254
The software references are a little out of date, but the opinions sound quite valid from a man who knows OS X file workings probably better than anyone reading this thread. Fragmentation appears to be the most critical for audio and video editors, who regularly work with files larger than the 20MB and below that OS X will defragment automatically.
Look at it this way: If you’re obsessed with defragmenting, you’re thinking as if you’re using Windows.
Suggest you do a spell check of your site:
change “so it must he some” to “so it must be some”
Thanks… Corrected the post..