[MacDV] Re: more about the inutility of defragmenting an OS X FS.

[James Asherman]

On Tuesday, December 30, 2003, at 11:15  PM, Peter van der Linden wrote:

>> Dec 30, 2003, at 7:45 PM, James Asherman wrote:
>>
>>>> According to Apple, disk de-fragmentation is "probably not required 
>>>> if you use MacOS X"  and
>>>>     "there is little benefit to defragmenting."
>>>
>>> If you don't care about speed or organization or performance.
>
> Please allow me to phrase this question in a less contentious way, and 
> a way which may yield more light than heat.  After all, it is possible 
> that the Apple technical note I referred to is wrong and that I am 
> also mistaken.
>
> James - why do you believe that there is a performance improvement to 
> defragmenting a disk drive under OS X?

I believe that recently added files become more speedily accessible 
when placed in long standing folders. Otherwise they are just hanging 
out all over the place.

>  What have you observed or measured that leads you to believe this?

The HD maps that Norton Speed disk produces that shows where all your 
files are .
The maps show you everything.

The speed increase after using it.

>   I accept that this was useful in the days of OS 9, and wonder if you 
> are thinking of that experience?  What aspect of performance has 
> improved for you, and by how much, and how did you measure it under OS 
> X?

Well If I am capturing a family film to my boot drive with iMovie and 
it runs into fragments of files laying around this hurts performance. 
It must.
Lets say you have a music folder you have been adding to for two years 
and you drop a song in it today. It does not land with the other files 
it just goes wherever.
Yes I could just drag the folder to another drive and delete and drag 
it back..
That defrags one folder.
Butt we arre adding and deleting things all the time. Putting them in 
there place and freeing up your free space so as to be contiguous 
improves the time it takes to find a file,
and keeps the free space clean.

>
> Second, what is an "organization" improvement?  I am not familiar with 
> that term.

Again, maybe you just downloaded an OS update. Looking at the map in 
speed disk you can see that it is just in whattever free space was 
available. Optimize and defrag and your OS comes together. This is an 
organizational improvement.

I am not offended by your contentiousness. On the contrary, stimulating.
im

>
> Thanks,
>
>     Peter
>