[MacDV] Re: Maxtor 160GB (Blue and White G3)

[Peter van der Linden]

On Jan 7, 2004, at 3:15 PM, Richard Gilmore wrote:

> I don't know about 10.3 but in 9 when I got to 60 of 80 gigs filled on 
> my hard
> drive it seemed to slow down considerably. Where are your numbers 
> saying it
> isn't so? Just my experience.
>
> Richard

Richard - thank you for your willingness to speak in support of 
bringing data to the table.  The debate isn't about MacOS 9 (though 
systems using HFS+ filesystems will be broadly similar to MacOS X).
A number of people have vociferously (not to say stubbornly and 
illogically) given their opinion that defragmenting disks makes I/O 
faster in MacOS 10.x.  I have challenged this claim, and asked the 
proponents to produce the data in support of their belief.

So far no one has produced any evidence.  You understand that it is up 
to those making a claim to produce the evidence in support, right?  The 
person who disbelieves a claim is entitled to ask for the evidence on 
which it is based.  None has been produced, nor will it be, since the 
belief is bogus.   If you make a claim "A", and someone says "I don't 
believe you", then you lose the argument if you can't support your 
claim, e.g. if your response is "bupkiss, whatever works for you" or 
"prove it".

Regardless, when I get the time, I will write some benchmarks to show 
(one way or the other) that "defragmenting" a disk does nothing of 
significance for I/O performance for MacOS 10.3.

    Peter