[MacDV] more about the inutility of defragmenting an OS X FS.

Peter van der Linden pvdl at afu.com
Tue Dec 30 19:31:31 PST 2003


On Dec 30, 2003, at 6:38 PM, Juan Mariscal wrote:
> When you off load a file delete it from the hard drive and then run 
> some utility on the hard drive to remove any fragmentation of the hard 
> drive to keep it moving quickly.

According to Apple, disk de-fragmentation is "probably not required if 
you use MacOS X"  and
     "there is little benefit to defragmenting."

See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

The tech pubs person who wrote that couldn't resist covering all the 
bases by adding the (probably wrong, but carried over from OS 9) 
information that "if your disks are almost full AND you OFTEN create or 
modify large files [on this almost full fs], there's a CHANCE you MIGHT 
benefit from defragmentation".

      Peter



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