[G4] defraging a Mac

[Jim Davis]

Why does it seem that every post from Alex drips with contempt and sarcasm?  If you don't have the patience to deal with these simple issues, then just give it up!  There are plenty of more patient experts out there- I'll just stop lurking and start answering.
Jim. 
On Saturday, April 03, 2004, at 10:40AM, Alex <alist at sprint.ca> wrote:

>
>On Friday, Apr 2, 2004, at 21:34 Canada/Eastern, Shaene wrote:
>
>> Bottom line is that there's not even a third of the importance here as 
>> there is on a Windows system, which brought "defrag" into mainstream 
>> usage, and into the front of many's minds regarding what they must do 
>> to keep their computing going along nicely.  Once again, on a Mac, you 
>> just don't have to worry about keeping several things in line.  Unless 
>>  you really think your disk is fragmented greatly and using a defrag 
>> is a must, don't worry about it.
>
>Bashing Windows on a Mac list requires just about as much guts as 
>bashing George W. Bush to a meeting of the Al-Tikriti. Perhaps those 
>who have the grit, knowledge, and appetite should take this kind of 
>"mine is bigger than yours" to a PC list or group, where there they can 
>find plenty of like-minded fellows eager to give them a run for their 
>money.
>
>As to disk fragmentation, it predates both Mac and Win. It's 
>essentially a file system issue, and HFS (the earlier Mac OS file 
>system) is actually more, not less, prone to it than comparable 
>systems. It's a side-effect of HFS's unique two-fork file architecture, 
>a sophisticated engineering feature which, unfortunately, has not been 
>adopted by other file systems. (Incidentally, the Apple reference 
>mentioned earlier in this thread alludes to this issue -- for those who 
>can read). HFS+, the current native Mac OS, is even slightly more 
>susceptible than HFS to fragmentation, again, a side-effect of its more 
>sophisticated management of allocation blocks.
>
>However, for other reasons (summarized in the Apple KB article ID 
>25668) fragmentation is less of an issue nowadays than it was five or 
>ten years ago. Some of those reasons apply to other computer platforms 
>as well.
>
>f
>
>
>
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