Defragment?

October 27th, 2003
Categories: OS X

I have never defragmented my iMac’s hard drive in the nearly two years that I’ve had it. No performance degradation, no disk errors. If it ain’t broke . . .

2 Responses to “Defragment?”

  1. Eli Sarver, on October 28th, 2003 at 5:46 PM Said:

    I can’t remember where the heck I read it, but I found out *somewhere* yesterday that the FS under MacOS X makes a point of moving files around as they are used in order to gain the highest contiguous chunks of files. In other words, not only is defragmenting unnecessary, it is unnecessary because it’s always going on.

  2. Stefan Kirby, on April 14th, 2005 at 3:55 PM Said:

    I haven’t read that information before, but my first response to it would be “oh, so thats why it’s so slow to begin with!”

    I would not trust an OS to defragment files on the fly, as they are being read. In fact, barring a clearer explanation, the very principle makes no practical or functional sense to me.

    Wouldn’t it be a tremendous drain on resources?

    I do not use a Mac (haven’t for about 10 years), but the times I am asked to try to work on one always leave me frustrated for the lack of any clear tools to address the symptoms I see, such as defragging.

    Now, maybe there is some *other* reason why my mother-in-law’s iMac moves as slow as molasses in January, and takes 10 minutes to boot up, but if it is because the HDD has never been defragmented in 5 years (one of the first things I’d do on any other computer showing these problems), it’s rather annoying that I have no built-in utility with which to perform the task

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