[Ti] utility for defragmenting my internal HD?

[Bill Reburn]

NICE!

Thanks for the schooling Mark.

All makes sense now.
Umm has anyone mentioned that Unix, like, um, Rules?!

On 12/20/02 11:12 AM, "Mark C. Langston" <mark at bitshift.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 20, 2002 at 11:01:54AM -0800, Bill Reburn wrote:
>> I don't understand what you and Loren are talking about.
>> 
>> I see you using the word 'should' - making me think this is a guess?
>> If anyone has opened up DiskWarrior or Norton on an OSX disk - they will see
>> that after only an initial installation of OSX and some applications that
>> Hard Drive fragmentation is quite apparent. Stuff gets thrown form here to
>> there.
>> 
>> After some months of use - the fragmentation is just as light or severe as
>> OS9 had - all depends on usage.
>> 
>> Or at least that is what is happening on my end.. Are these applications
>> incorrectly reporting these results? I can see OSX being able to handle
>> whatever is thrown at it.. But there are absolute performance differences on
>> machines (HD's) that have been severely fragmented.
>> 
> 
> Your applications are displaying the data accurately.
> What they're saying is this:  The filesystem that OS X uses is different
> than that used by OS 9, or Windows.  It's derived -- as is almost every
> other Unix filesystem -- from Kirk McKusik's Berkeley Fast Filesystem
> (BFFS).  This type of filesystem was designed to handle fragmentation
> well instead of poorly.
> 
> In other words, yes, your filesystem is fragmented.  However, on OS X,
> it doesn't matter.  The way the filesystem goes from one block to the
> next (rather, from one inode to the next) doesn't depend upon the
> location of the next inode, from a logical point of view (there will
> be a miniscule impact should the data be on a significantly different
> physical portion of the disk, but a) you wouldn't notice it, and
> b) it's more a factor of the hard drive spindle speed and head seek time
> than it is of fragmentation).
> 
> So relax, and ignore those fragmentation reports.  Or revel in the fact
> that you don't need to defragment any more.  It's just another benefit
> of using a Unix-based OS.
> 








Bill Reburn