Disk Defragmenting on a Mac

On windows u can defragment and do a disk cleanup. . .does a mac have something like this?. . or anytype of unharmful cleaning program?

mcatt66 said:

On windows u can defragment and do a disk cleanup. . .does a mac have something like this?. . or anytype of unharmful cleaning program?

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No, Mac does not need to be defragmented.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70393&highlight=defrag

I'm no authority, but when I did a full defrag with this software iDefrag, my Macs were noticeably faster. I don't know how it is, but it is.

goobimama said:

I'm no authority, but when I did a full defrag with this software iDefrag, my Macs were noticeably faster. I don't know how it is, but it is.

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Same here.

Don't believe rhetoric of a company trying to sell you something. Even OSX needs manual defragmentation every now and then.

DiskWarrior's optimized directory also gives a noticeable boost.

Thanks for the info guys!

giulio said:

Same here.

Don't believe rhetoric of a company trying to sell you something. Even OSX needs manual defragmentation every now and then.

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No offense, but I'll go with the guys who engineered the filesystem on this.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668
or perhaps some other guy who's actually looked into fragmentation on HFS+
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/

DiskWarrior's optimized directory also gives a noticeable boost.

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No, it usually doesn't, but if if it makes you feel better, go for it.

Very informative Technologist....thanks!

I'm telling you man. It does speed up. The full defragmenting puts all the applications at the start of the disk and does all that defragmenting which we see on PCs. My one year old iMac was running like a mad dog after doing a defrag and so was my iBook...

DiskWarrior appears to be a $99 package. That is a LOT of money for a utility whose speed up benefits appear to be in some question.

I would invite others who have DiskWarrior to comment. Do you observe a noticeable speed boost after running it? Are you also running other maintenance at the same time (such as OnyX)? Are you sure that the speedup comes from DiskWarrior and not other activities?

DiskWarrior is mostly useful as a disk repair and data recovery tool. It's optimization features are of little use to most people, but that doesn't mean it's not useful.

goobimama said:

I'm telling you man. It does speed up. The full defragmenting puts all the applications at the start of the disk and does all that defragmenting which we see on PCs. My one year old iMac was running like a mad [censored] after doing a defrag and so was my iBook...

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Maybe it did, but it's like those "I lost 80 pounds in a week!" plans..."Results not typical." I would not suggest disk optimization on an HFS+ disk as a matter of course.

What does Disk Warrior do besides optimize the directory? That's the only thing it ever does for me. Granted it has helped problems in the past, but I didn't know that fragmented directory data could be such an issue.