Defragment internal drive on MacBook

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Hi,

I want to defragment the internal drive on my MacBook. Currently at home with my folks, I have access to another MacBook. And I have a couple of empty portable USB drive. (Internal HD is 160GB, external ones are bigger than that). I'm running 10.5.9, my mother is on 10.4.11

What's the best procedure to go about this? Is the following step-by-step OK to do? Or can you think of an easier/quicker way?

• Mirror my internal HD to an external USB drive via 'Ghostimage' or similar software

• Switch off my MacBook, connect it to my Mom's MacBook via Firewire cable, then reboot my MacBook in Transfer mode ("Apple + T" during startup), so it appears on my Mother's as an external HD

• Use DiskDoctor on my Mom's MacBook to reformat my MacBook drive ("HFS+, Journaled" I guess?)

• Connect external USB drive with the mirrored image of my system to my Mom's computer & transfer it back to my MacBook (which would still be connected in Firewire mode).

Unfortunately I don't have DriveGenius, so that's not an option...

Thanks for your help & input on this!

Hi,

I want to defragment the internal drive on my MacBook. Currently at home with my folks, I have access to another MacBook. And I have a couple of empty portable USB drive. (Internal HD is 160GB, external ones are bigger than that). I'm running 10.5.9, my mother is on 10.4.11

What's the best procedure to go about this? Is the following step-by-step OK to do? Or can you think of an easier/quicker way?

• Mirror my internal HD to an external USB drive via 'Ghostimage' or similar software

• Switch off my MacBook, connect it to my Mom's MacBook via Firewire cable, then reboot my MacBook in Transfer mode ("Apple + T" during startup), so it appears on my Mother's as an external HD

• Use DiskDoctor on my Mom's MacBook to reformat my MacBook drive ("HFS+, Journaled" I guess?)

Connect external USB drive with the mirrored image of my system to my Mom's computer & transfer it back to my MacBook (which would still be connected in Firewire mode).

Unfortunately I don't have DriveGenius, so that's not an option...

Thanks for your help & input on this!

Hi,

I want to defragment the internal drive on my MacBook. Currently at home with my folks, I have access to another MacBook. And I have a couple of empty portable USB drive. (Internal HD is 160GB, external ones are bigger than that). I'm running 10.5.9, my mother is on 10.4.11

What's the best procedure to go about this? Is the following step-by-step OK to do? Or can you think of an easier/quicker way?

• Mirror my internal HD to an external USB drive via 'Ghostimage' or similar software

• Switch off my MacBook, connect it to my Mom's MacBook via Firewire cable, then reboot my MacBook in Transfer mode ("Apple + T" during startup), so it appears on my Mother's as an external HD

• Use DiskDoctor on my Mom's MacBook to reformat my MacBook drive ("HFS+, Journaled" I guess?)

• Connect external USB drive with the mirrored image of my system to my Mom's computer & transfer it back to my MacBook (which would still be connected in Firewire mode).

Unfortunately I don't have DriveGenius, so that's not an option...

Thanks for your help & input on this!

I assume that by Disk Doctor you mean Disk Utility? Otherwise you should be OK.

BTW does your Mac boot off of an external USB drive? If so, you could avoid Target Disk mode. Simply clone your internal drive to an external making sure to create a "bootable" clone. Then boot from the clone erase the internal drive and clone everything back.

I'd suggest either Super Duper pr Carbon Copy Cloner. Both are capable of creating "bootable" clones. Newer versions Disk Utility can as well but I don't remember when they added that ability.

What makes you think you even need to defragment? That's something that 99.9999% of Mac users never have to do.

Thanks for that reminder. Most user won't see significant improvement from defragmenting an OS X drive. The exception would be if you are pushing large files such as in video editing. The other case is setting up a Bootcamp partition. The assistant looks for contiguous free space to create the Win partition.

Once again Schweb beats me to the punch. Gotta either type less or paster. lol

Please don't crosspost or ask your question multiple times in different places.

The Community Guidelines state:

Post appropriately.
Search first, post things in the right place, use descriptive thread titles, and don't crosspost. Those things will help get you more timely responses and help keep our community nice and tidy.

Click to expand...

Thanks for understanding!

Sorry - the crossposting happened by accident. Something to do with the history in my browser & crash whilst submitting a post.

I think I need to defragment, because I noticed my mom's computer booting A LOT faster than mine, although it's older & with a slower processor.
And yes, I often do work with larger files and for the past 6 months (on and off), I've sometimes had VERY little space on the internal HD. Partly because of Photoshop swap files, partly because of filling up the HD with 24mp RAW files when I was on the move & external HD was full.

One thing I'm wondering:
If I create a copy of my fragmented drive via a disk image or similar (ghostimage): doesn't this also copy the actual fragmentation itself? In other words, makeing the whole exercise a bit pointless...?

If I remember correctly the fragmentation is removed during the cloning process and things are copied in contiguous blocks. I used Drive Genius when I installed Windows but I am pretty sure I have used the cloning method in the past. Can someone else confirm this.

@Slydude

Cloning doesn't remove the fragmentation as the cloning process is usually a block by block copy. (Both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper use Block Level Copying) However, what seems to do the best job of removing fragmentation is an erase and reinstall and recovery with Time Machine. That has been my experience.

BTW, both Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost use the same Block Level Copying for cloning FAT-32, NTFS, and Ext3 partitions and drives.

Thanks for clearing that up. I must have used Drive Genius the last time I did it.

Bottom line: by NOW you might need to "defrag," but generally speaking you don't.

What you (and all other Mac users) DO need to do is NOT repeat NOT let the available HD space get too low. *That* is what causes a lot of these problems.

I've said here many times that I consider 12GB of free space a dead minimum for a well-functioning Mac. It's just an opinion, but I find that for the average Mac owner 12GB seems to be enough to keep the Mac humming along smoothly. Any less than that and you're asking for trouble IMHO.

Found this link:
7 disk defragmenters to boost performance on the Apple Mac OS X

According to this, CCC and SuperDuper actually DO work for defragmenting. This actually makes sense to me (correct me if I'm wrong): since CCC just copies the files from one drive to the other and DOESNT create an image file. Data Rescue / Drive Genius create image files, as far as I can remember. And that would be a block level copy, no?

Take note that with both CCC and SuperDuper the internal drive must first be erased before you can "clone" back. And even at that, I'm not convinced that the defragmentation will be gone since both programs use block level copying. And, my own experience with using CCC (I have not tried SuperDuper) is that it is not effective.

The only way that seems to work well is as I mentioned above (restoring with Time Machine after the drive has been erased).

There are programs (mentioned in the article) which will do defragmentation without having to erase the drive first. I usually recommend iDefrag because it is the least expensive and others who post in these forums have given it a good review.

NOW, I know this is an old thread (at least in 'computer years') - BUT, I just obtained a MBP (and plan on purchasing an iMac for my wife in a month or two), so trying to learn Mountain Lion as quick as possible - from the responses to this thread a few years back, the need for OS X defragmentation was pretty much stated to be not needed.

Mountain Lion does not come w/ a defrag program, so a 3rd party addition, if desired - since the time of this thread has anything changed to suggest the need for this disk utility? My MBP has a SSD - is defrag an issue w/ this drive (also I'm planning on buying the fusion drive for the iMac w/ 128 GB of SSD) - WHY bring up this issue?

WELL, I've been reading a the book OS X Mountain Lion for Dummies (2012) by Mark Chambers (really 8 books in 1 @ 750 pages - not really for Dummies) - now on pg. 155 of this book the quote below w/ the heading appears - now this guy seems quite experienced and claims to have 20+ years as a Mac technician - SO, why such a discrepancy in opinions about this utility? DO I have to consider the need for defragmentation on my new MBP or on my near to be purchased iMac - thanks for any comments and advice. Dave

I Further Demand That Your Defragment

Defragmenting your hard drive can significantly improve it's performance....

However, Apple dropped the ball on this one.....Luckily many 3rd party disk utilities also include a defrag... feature....I recommend that your use it once a month.

Click to expand...

Well, he may have 20+ years of experience with Macs but I have to disagree with him about using a defrag utility once a month. The Unix file system by its nature does not cause fragmentation to the extent that the FAT or NTFS file systems do.

There are times when a defrag utility comes in handy, like setting up a Boot Camp partition to install Windows and finding out that your drive does not have enough continuous free space to create the partition. In that situation, a defrag utility can help. But that situation can also be resolved by erasing the drive, reinstalling and restoring with Time Machine.

Having said all that, I do own iDefrag 2 by Coriolis software. I've only used it twice in the last two years.

The only other situation where I have seen defragmentation mentioned by Apple is moving around large video files. I don't know how noticeable the performance difference is but it can't hurt in that case

In your case - you should never defragment a SSD. You are shortening it's lifespan by doing so.

Because you are using a SSD, you can quit reading about defragging OS X and start doing some research on defragging a SSD drive - it's a no no.


(Will add that I do defrag my personal OS X HDD machine - that author is still wrong in suggesting the general OS X user should pick up the practice of defragging their drive once a month - what a waste of time - that one item right there indicates that author is a Windows user that has not spent much time at all actually using Macs, nor in the Mac communities. Defragging a HDD "might" be of benefit because it reads sequentially - not random as a SSD.)