[X4U] De-fragmentation (revisited)

[Randy B. Singer]

Daniel Beck said:

>I'm sure you'll be fine. If someone does feel the need to defrag, I 
>think the best way (assuming one has the means) is to Carbon Copy the 
>entire volume over to another disk and then back again.

That will defragment the drive, but it won't optimize it.  In fact, it 
might detrimentally impact performance.

As Apple says:

>There is also a chance that one of the files placed in the "hot band" for 
>rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, 
>which would actually decrease performance.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

That's one of the reasons why it is important to defragment/optimize your 
hard drive with a utility, and that you should use a utility that is OS X 
savvy.  Which is why I can no longer recommend Alsoft's Plus Optimizer.   
(Some folks have reported that using Plus Optimizer has actually caused a 
decrease in performance.  PO hasn't been updated in three years, and it 
apparently is not OS X savvy.)





Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

How To Deal With Common OS X 10.3 Panther Problems
http://www.macattorney.com/panther.html