rman said:
Because OS X is using journaling now you don't see fragmentation as much now.
I need some education…what does journaling have to do file fragmentation? It seems that journaling is a safety net, not a system tuner.
If a file is broken into pieces then it will take that many reads to get the pieces. Thus, more pieces = more reads, more reads = you know. I've used Drive 10 to optimize my drives and have found a noticeable difference after defragmenting.
This is portion of article 107249 that I pulled from the Apple site. This article is dated 11/12/02, so maybe there has been additional functions/processes added to Apple's journaling process since then that eliminates the need for optimizing a badly fragmented volume.
About file system journaling.
"Journaling" is a feature that helps protect the file system against power outages or hardware component failures, reducing the need for repairs. Journaling was first introduced in Mac OS X Server 10.2.2, then to the non-server OS in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. This document explains some of the benefits of using this feature and how it works.
Journaling for the Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) file system enhances computer availability and fault resilience, which is especially noteworthy for servers. Journaling protects the integrity of the file system on Xserve and other computers using Mac OS X Server in the event of an unplanned shutdown or power failure. It also helps to maximize the uptime of servers and connected storage devices by expediting repairs to the affected volumes when the system restarts.
Journaling is a technique that helps protect the integrity of the Mac OS Extended file systems on Mac OS X volumes. It both prevents a disk from getting into an inconsistent state and expedites disk repair if the server fails.
When you enable journaling on a disk, a continuous record of changes to files on the disk is maintained in the journal. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, the journal is used to restore the disk to a known-good state when the server restarts.
With journaling turned on, the file system logs transactions as they occur. If the server fails in the middle of an operation, the file system can "replay" the information in its log and complete the operation when the server restarts.