Defrag a Mac?

Bokeh

Got an email from the boss, asking to try to find a defrag program for his two Macs at home. I don't deal on this side of the tracks, so if anyone has some recommendations I would appreciate it. I do know that OSX will defrag files smaller than 20mb, but thats about it.

twodogs62

Good question, Best place to ask this on Apple discussion forums.
I had great responses, check in communities and believe forums are under there.

QHalo

OSX generally does a very good job about keeping the disk optimized. You can use the Disk Utility item already included with OSX to do it. Either way you're probably not going to gain much in terms of performance.

kriscamaro68

Check out a utility called onyx for mac. This utility helps keep the mac running its best with lots of different tools and you can download it right from apples site. Just google onyx and it will be one of the hits.

IRONMONKUS

The only time you need to defrag is if your hard drive is almost full or you do a lot of video editing constantly...

This is from Apple, which relates up to OSX10.5, but I'm sure is also considered with 10.6:

"Do I need to optimize?

You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X. Here's why:

Hard disk capacity is generally much greater now than a few years ago. With more free space available, the file system doesn't need to fill up every "nook and cranny." Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible, to avoid prematurely filling small areas of recently-freed space.

Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk.

Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering."
Aggressive read-ahead and write-behind caching means that minor fragmentation has less effect on perceived system performance.

For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.

Note:Mac OS X systems use hundreds of thousands of small files, many of which are rarely accessed. Optimizing them can be a major effort for very little practical gain. There is also a chance that one of the files placed in the "hot band" for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance.

If you think you might need to defragment

Try restarting first. It might help, and it's easy to do.

If your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files (such as editing video, but see the Tip below if you use iMovie and Mac OS X 10.3), there's a chance the disks could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities.

Another option is to back up your important files, erase the hard disk, then reinstall Mac OS X and your backed up files."

xenodamus

IRONMONKUS wrote: »

Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible...

Wow...never knew that. Why doesn't Windows do this?

Bokeh

Well thanks for all the recommendations. Boss popped in from off site meetings, and he just moved about 750gb of video files to his portable drive. Now wants to install bootcamp and either XP or Win 7 and dual boot. Only reason is there is an issue with his Quicken 2010-2011 and being able to download information from your accounts into Quicken. Only effects the Mac version, MS version works just fine.

tiersten

xenodamus wrote: »

Wow...never knew that. Why doesn't Windows do this?

NTFS does do that. Most modern filesystems will do the same thing since the expectation is that your HD is very large anyway so it is better and easier to allocate from large contiguous sections than to reuse.

By default Windows does schedule a defragmentation task weekly but you can turn it off without affecting your HD performance much. If you regularly fill your HD with many small files followed by deleting only some of them then sure, you're going to end up with horrendous fragmentation but you'll get that with HFS+ as well.

xenodamus

tiersten wrote: »

NTFS does do that.

Interesting...ya learn something everyday.

Speaking of defragmentation, does anyone else work with support guys who try to defragment as a fix for nearly every problem? It's not just a routine task they run on machines they're working on. They put it in the resolution section for any ticket they can't find an obvious solution to. Lockups..slowness..IE crashes..spontaneous reboots..all closed with "Defragged hard disk drive" as the resolution.

tiersten

xenodamus wrote: »

Speaking of defragmentation, does anyone else work with support guys who try to defragment as a fix for nearly every problem? It's not just a routine task they run on machines they're working on. They put it in the resolution section for any ticket they can't find an obvious solution to. Lockups..slowness..IE crashes..spontaneous reboots..all closed with "Defragged hard disk drive" as the resolution.

1. Tried it again?
2. Rebooted?
3. Defragged?
4. Reinstalled?
5. Sorry. I'm going to have to escalate this to the next tier.

wd40

tiersten wrote: »

1. Tried it again?
2. Rebooted?
3. Defragged?
4. Reinstalled?
5. Sorry. I'm going to have to escalate this to the next tier.

When I started my current job I thought that formatting PC's was for idiots, and that I should spend 8 hours on fixing broken PC's.

But after 5 years in the same company at a helpdesk position, I can say that re-imaging the machine solves current issues as will as some future issues.

with a new images you get all the updates, non of the old applications / drivers etc that should not be there, + you delete a lot of junk that accumulates by different users throughout the months that the PC was used.