[X4U] Re: Defragmentation, was Cause of kernel panics

[Randy B.Singer]

Keith Whaley said:

>Your analysis confuses me, Don.


Don't be confused by Don, Keith.  He is just a troll that can be 
dismissed.

At this point all the major authorities agree that if your drive is 
approaching 20% full you should defragment your drive to stave off funky 
behavior or even directory damage, or you should get a new drive (which 
is, of course, a perfectly fine way of handling the situation, though not 
an economical one if you have a huge hard drive and expect to make use of 
multiple gigabytes of unused space on it.)

Anyone who denies that drives become fragmented simply doesn't know 
anything about personal computers.  All that you have to do is run the 
"check drive" feature of any defragmentation program to get a graphical 
representation of how much fragmentation your drive has. 

The thing that many resources fail to point out, especially the ones that 
rely on the fact that OS X 10.3 has some automatic defragmentation 
capabilities built-in, is that there is a difference between file 
fragmentation and drive fragmentation.  Drive fragmentation won't cause a 
performance slowdown, or for that matter it won't cause any problems at 
all, until you are just about out of free contiguous space on your hard 
drive.  At that point drive fragmentation can cause all sorts of 
problems, including directory damage.  This despite the fact that your 
drive at the same time may have gigabytes of free space.



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

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html