Defragmenting Hard Drive

How do I defrag my harddrive in OSX? or do I just never have to do that on a mac?

-thanks

from what
I hear nope, just run disk utilities every now and then

OS X does not defrag on its own, and there have been proven reports that defraging will speed up your drive activity if heavily fragmented.

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius_info.php

works great

I got Drive Genius and it looks like a good program, but how do I unmount my main hardrive since I am using it when I open drive genius?

OS X does defragment automatically. It doesn't defragment completely; it only joins files that are likely to cause a noticeable slowdown.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/

Completely defragging a hard drive is almost never worth the trouble. For one thing, the increase in speed is more than compensated for by the time it takes to run the defrag software. And even when you're done...it just ends up fragmented again once you start using it.

According to this OX does defrag itself.
http://nslog.com/archives/2003/10/26/qotd_fragmentation.php

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.macosx.general/22906

most of the regulars around here, including myself, say you do not need to defrag your hd under OS X.....i have ran my PB for close to 3 years with out it and never noticed a slow down (except when i had 50MB left on the HD)....

Turn on "File Vault" its in your system prefs, i think under accounts/users. that will keep your mac nice and clean :headphone

robbiemullen said:

Turn on "File Vault" its in your system prefs, i think under accounts/users. that will keep your mac nice and clean :headphone

Click to expand...

All File Vault does is encrypt your Home folder. It does nothing to improve maintenance or clean out your HD in any way.

Thanks

boarderjosh10 said:

I got Drive Genius and it looks like a good program, but how do I unmount my main hardrive since I am using it when I open drive genius?

Click to expand...

you have to boot from the cd

"If your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files (such as editing video, but see the Tip below if you use iMovie and Mac OS X 10.3), there's a chance the disks could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities."

this is basically saying that OS X will not help heavily fragmented drives, notice the use of heavily in my original post.