Flaky Input

[Charles Martin]

> From: "Chris Walker" <chris at mymac.demon.co.uk>
> Since we have strayed into the area of disk Utilities, what would you
> suggest as the best one to use for de-fragging a Disk.

Nothing. Panther does this by itself to a limited extent, and the OS is 
designed to cope with it.

>   DiskWarrior is OK
> for rebuilding directories, but not for optimisation and I believe 
> Norton
> is no longer being produced.

They just announced that they are retiring SystemWorks and Norton 
Utilities, yes.

As you say, DW is great for optimising the directory but doesn't do 
anything about defragging the actual files.

>   This would suggest TechTool Pro as being
> the sole remaining optimisation utility, but is it reliable?

I own it, but do not really use it for that purpose now that Panther 
handled it itself. I'm also no expert on disk utilities but I will say 
that Drive 10 and Tech Tool Pro don't seem to do any harm.

The UNIX geeks would say that the BEST way to defrag a hard drive is to:
1. Completely clone your system onto a bootable extra HD;
2. Test to make sure it works;
3. Reformat the original HD;
4. Clone everything back.
(note that I'm using the word "clone" and *not* "copy"; there's an 
important difference in OS X.)

And they'd be right -- and the time factor isn't all that different, so 
perhaps it IS the best way. But as I said, in normal use defragging is 
now (under Panther) an issue we probably don't have to think about too 
much.

_Chas_

"If you want to encourage your kids to color outside the lines, think 
creatively and zig when the other kids zag, get the Mac. On the other 
hand, if you want to teach your kid that life is full of frustration 
and that anything worth getting takes plenty of patience and hard work, 
a Windows machine should do quite nicely."
-- D. Plotnikoff