[X4U] De-fragmentation (revisited)

[drunk]

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 19:05:57 -0400, lists3-200402 wrote:
> why would you recommend ANY defrag utility? apple's knowledge base 
> and just about every competent tech will tell you it's simply not an 
> issue anymore. the system does a fine job managing fragmentation 
> without any third party assitance (read: no need to spend money).
> 
> to beat on this dead horse shows you have waayyy too much time on 
> your hands...maybe your time would be better spent learning/preaching 
> unix?

Sorry, gonna have to tell you to back off on this one, saying something is true doesn't often make it true... fragmentation is less of an issue than it was, for some of the reasons mentioned (better seek ahead, larger space, etc), but only for lots of users. I've seen too many machines that didn't have filevault turned on, but that gave a "disk was responding too slow" error in things like iMovie that went away once the disk was defragged. How you choose to do it is up to you, and whether or not your usage would benefit, but the benefit can be there. It's kind of like virus utilities or firewalls... they might not seem necessary in OSX, but lots of users will find them of value, and not just psychologically.

As for why you might want a utility over something like copying to and from a drive... good defraggers don't simply defrag the individual files, they're often very smart about watching usage patterns and grouping specific/types files together for much less head seeking. Unfortunately there's nothing I really trust for this on OSX at the moment. :/

drunkenbatman ( there! )