Defragmenting your Mac's hard disk

tsinc80697 · 3 May 2009 at 11:58

Noticed any difference in performance?

Feek · 3 May 2009 at 12:04

It's mainly media so I don't know if I will or not and when you look at the figures it wasn't as bad as the image initially makes you think. I'll do my OS/Applications drive overnight tonight.

hughythomas · 4 May 2009 at 10:22

TheVoice said:
iDefrag can do it, but as far as I know to do a full defrag it needs another Mac to run the actual program while the Mac to be defragged is connected in Target Disk mode.

Made a significant difference to start-up and application speed on my friends Macs when they did it a couple of years back.

Yup, I had the same experience with my mac. Use a Mac Pro workstation for music production and I defragged the system disk as well as the audio drive using iDefrag and the difference was staggering. The Mac booted quicker and the apps did not take so long to load. Furthermore Logic would not give the Disk I/O Read error DIsk too Slow message when working with certain projects,

Highly recommended.

Feek · 4 May 2009 at 10:25

iDefrag doesn't need a second Mac to run - They supply a utility that can be used to burn a boot DVD so you can defrag the drive while it's dismounted. Of course, you can't use your Mac while it's doing it but I did mine overnight, it wasn't finished when I got up so I just left it running.

Rambaud · 4 May 2009 at 10:30

Bought iDefrag a couple of days ago.

I did a full defrag on my macbook via a cloned OS X external drive. Also ran Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory structure.

Result was a bit a much snappier machine.

Darryn · 4 May 2009 at 10:57

You noticed any improvement in operation or boot time since the defrag Mr Feek?

My 8core Boot-drive.

My 4core Boot-drive.

Neither look healthy, neither have been defragged since ive owned them though.

Feek · 4 May 2009 at 11:09

I've not done my boot drive yet, so I can't answer that.

But looking closer, I think all that red is misleading. Your first one, you have 1,036,590 files and out of thatonly 2,198 are fragmented and in the second instance you have 291,310 files and just 4,297 are fragmented. That's 0.1% and 0.5% respectively!