[G4] defraging a Mac

[sr ferenczy]

not knowing how os x truly works, i cant say whether files and their 
(up to 4) forks should be contiguous for best performance or not. i do 
know that many os x defragging tools do NOT worry about keeping 
individual forks contiguous with the entire file, rather they only keep 
forks contiguous with themselves.

also, though "legend would have it"..... hfs+ would have been logically 
much better at staving off fragmentation than the competitors when it 
came out (os 8.1, i was wrong earlier) simply by the nature of how 
small of a segment of a harddrive it could allocate (smaller allocation 
levels=lessroom for fragmentation.
i know fat16 was horrible when it came to getting fragmented, and NTFS 
has improved on fat32.... in the same way hfs+ had big issues when it 
came on the scene for macs, but with its current state on 10.3, it even 
self-defrags files up to 25? KB.... much better than any other desktop 
option out there.

sandor





-----------------------------------
On Apr 4, 2004, at 9:40 AM, Alex wrote:

>
> On Saturday, Apr 3, 2004, at 15:46 Canada/Eastern, sr ferenczy wrote:
>
>> [...] actually, according to many, including david shayer in this 
>> article:
>> http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07254 have pointed out that 
>> the OPPOSITE of what you are saying is true. [...]
>
> "[...] Legend has it that the FAT file system was pretty bad about 
> fragmenting files [...]"
>
> Legend.
>
> David Shayer's article is interesting, but quite incomplete. (No 
> mention of resource forks -- for those more directly interested in 
> things under the hood --, or of issues related to video editing, large 
> databases, etc.)
>
> f