Defragmenting your Mac's hard disk

AJUK said:
It doesn't need it.
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Ignore this.

EVERY filesystem, no matter how good it is at mitigating the effects of fragmentation, will eventually resort to it if the disk starts getting very full. The question is how full is your disk?

Easiest way to defragment on a Mac: backup, format & reinstall
 
Easiest way to defragment on a Mac: backup, format & reinstall
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I think you're probably sending out the wrong message.

HFS+ doesn't fragment as much as something like FAT32. To summarise, I wouldn't worry about it very much and spend sleepless nights thinking about it. Under typical usage you will not need to frequently defragment your disk(s).
 
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to say he should worry about fragmentation. Just the previous advice of "Macs are super awesome" isn't accurate.

Two software based things can effect (Hard Disk) Drive performance: fragmentation and how compact your files are. Both are present using OS X, but fragmentation at least isn't generally an issue :)
 
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.
 
Fillado said:
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to say he should worry about fragmentation. Just the previous advice of "Macs are super awesome" isn't accurate.

Two software based things can effect (Hard Disk) Drive performance: fragmentation and how compact your files are. Both are present using OS X, but fragmentation at least isn't generally an issue :)
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No one has said "Macs are super awesome", all I have said is that defrag isn't needed.
 
AJUK said:
No one has said "Macs are super awesome", all I have said is that defrag isn't needed.
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"It doesn't need it" is typically a statement spouted from one Apple user to another to show how much better OS X is - without remotely understanding what's going on.

Microsoft Office for Mac isn't fully compatible with Microsoft Office for Windows.

See how easy it is being accurate but nowhere near telling the whole story? The above statement is entirely true, and i'm sure telling that to a large amount of "switchers" would make them run a mile. Explaining to them that they are 99.99% compatible but they use two separate code bases so some issues can arise is the whole story.

As for fragmenting, if a user isn't near the total space of the hard disk and isn't chucking about GB files, HFS+ handles things much better than NTFS and so defragmenting isn't necessary. However if you are close to your drive limit then fragmentation will always occur no matter what filesystem you use.
 
Fillado said:
As for fragmenting, if a user isn't near the total space of the hard disk and isn't chucking about GB files, HFS+ handles things much better than NTFS and so defragmenting isn't necessary. However if you are close to your drive limit then fragmentation will always occur no matter what filesystem you use.
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Given that we know this guy is new to Macs, so probably hasn't got a full hard disk, the response of "it doesn't need it" is fair enough.

To be honest, the problem of fragmentation is fairly overblown on anything but FAT filesystems. It's still an issue on ntfs but the problem is tiny, unless the disk is filling up. It's visually non-existent on hfs and most of the free filesystems.
 
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