Defragmenting?

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Must one defragment the Mac hard disk?
 
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Ok I got Mac Janitor, but when you run tasks, it does not specify what it is doing, or give you options. Basically, is it defragmenting?
 

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lol - Mac Janitor is an ok tool. Doesn't tell you what it's doing because all it does is run the regular maintenance scripts (cleaning). I'd recommend doing this for those that turn their machine off at night and not already using either Onyx or MainMenu.

It does exactly what it says it does on it's home page; no more, no less. Just follow the directions there.

No, it does not defrag. Under ordinary circumstances there is no need to defrag OS X. OS X takes care of this function all on it's own, behind the scenes, without any input from you or the running of 3rd party apps.
 

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No, it does not defrag. Under ordinary circumstances there is no need to defrag OS X. OS X takes care of this function all on it's own, behind the scenes, without any input from you or the running of 3rd party apps.

And the same is true of most maintenance tasks. Feeling the need to perform constant maintenance is one of those bad habits many of us bring with us from the Windows world. It simply isn't necessary on OS X.

Generally speaking, as it relates to OS X maintenance - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you really feel the need to do some proactive maintenance, you don't need to run a tool like Onyx or MainMenu more than once a quarter or so. Killing all of those caches constantly will actually slow regular use of the machine and sort of defeats the point of a cache to begin with.
 
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And the same is true of most maintenance tasks. Feeling the need to perform constant maintenance is one of those bad habits many of us bring with us from the Windows world. It simply isn't necessary on OS X.

I suppose I fit into that cohort. And I've had my MB for a while now. To be honest, I can't say I fully believe you, despite being much more experienced with Mac's. I am regularly looking for little ways I can fasten the screws, ever so gently, for a long smooth ride with personalized yet formal tuning.
 

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I suppose I fit into that cohort. And I've had my MB for a while now. To be honest, I can't say I fully believe you, despite being much more experienced with Mac's. I am regularly looking for little ways I can fasten the screws, ever so gently, for a long smooth ride with personalized yet formal tuning.

I feel that compulsion as well and occasionally give into it - but the funny thing is, the performance of my Mac doesn't really change much - but I do notice that it takes longer to boot.

If you look at the various tasks these tools perform, most of them are simple housekeeping (purging caches, cleaning up temp files, etc). Unless the drive is close to capacity, if you think about it, how do these things really impact performance?

Take the cwa107 challenge...

Use XBench and Geekbench to run a benchmark on your machine today. Let the machine alone (from a maintenance perspective) for 3 months (set an iCal reminder) and benchmark it again. I'll bet you won't see any difference in performance. Frankly, I'll bet if you let it go for 6 months you wouldn't see a difference either.
 
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Must one defragment the Mac hard disk?

No, but I do it once in awhile anyway. TechTool Pro runs a "scan" and shows a graph of how fragmented your disk(s) is(are). Usually, it doesn't show much, so I skip the actual optimization. But, after several months, there are fragments that appear to be significant, so I go ahead and clean them up.
 
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No, but I do it once in awhile anyway. TechTool Pro runs a "scan" and shows a graph of how fragmented your disk(s) is(are). Usually, it doesn't show much, so I skip the actual optimization. But, after several months, there are fragments that appear to be significant, so I go ahead and clean them up.

That's another natural compulsion. The idea that the logical structures inside their computer get "dirty" and need to be "cleaned." What looks "neat and clean" to human eyes is not necessarily what's fastest for a computer.
 
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That's another natural compulsion. The idea that the logical structures inside their computer get "dirty" and need to be "cleaned." What looks "neat and clean" to human eyes is not necessarily what's fastest for a computer.

It's funny, but I thought the same thing when I read this thread an hour or so ago. I always remember how the blocks on Windows lined up all neat and color coded, never thinking that the computer may not actually work better that way...
 
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And see all these green dots under these guys posts? Just believe them as they will not lead you astray.
 

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Programs that run the maintenance scripts are fine to have around and run if you are experiencing a problem otherwise they are for the most part unnecessary. If your Mac happens to be off at the appointed time recent incarnations of OS X generally take care of this for you.

After using a Mac since the 1990s I finally broke myself of the defragmentation habit. The only time I had to perform it recently was in setting up my Boot Camp partition. The Setup Assistant complained about a lack of available space.

Lest you think I am making both statements up see Five Mac maintenance myths | Mac | Editors' Notes | Macworld
 
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lol I guess I do still have Windows mentality...OS X dos it anyway? Dang! I love it! I shall delete Janitor now. Thanks for letting me know! :)
 
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After using a Mac since the 1990s I finally broke myself of the defragmentation habit.

To be fair, OS9 and older were just as bad as Windows when it came to fragmenting and did need it done every so often. The early versions of OSX could live without it for the most part.
 
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And see all these green dots under these guys posts? Just believe them as they will not lead you astray.

And ditto to your green dots too harry :)
 

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To be fair, OS9 and older were just as bad as Windows when it came to fragmenting and did need it done every so often. The early versions of OSX could live without it for the most part.

You're right about that. I had a rather interesting way of avoiding that problem. I had a habit of partitioning the drive. It usually meant that I had made the partition too small and needed to resize it several months later.

Of course at that time you could not resize partitions without reformatting. Reformatting the drive of course erases the data. Reloading from backup caused the data to be loaded contiguously hence no fragmentation.
 

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