ok so i take it back... i have previously posted my dubiousness as to the need to defrag, my claim was that it would likely produce any noticeable speed improvements ONLY in a_very_severely_fragged_older_Mac, or if one works with very large audio, photoshop, or video files... i.e., the average Mac user with a Mac made in the past year or so (longer maybe) will likely not notice any speed gains from defragging... and i still maintain that to be true up to a point, and here is that point:
http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/N25145
i understand the distinction between the condition(s) described in the TIL article and the comment on speed gains i just made, but_also_i thought defragging to be of little or no use whatever when a Mac won't boot
i very very rarely defrag my HD(s) and i can tell you this Mac is fast and stable (rev2 beige mini G3 466MHz, OS 9.04), and i run SETI from a RAM Disk so it gets a de facto defragging every time i restart
i can defrag it at any time by backing it up to the HD and then reloading it to RAM disk, takes seconds... and finally, i do consider myself a fairly average Mac user who has no_real_need of defragging but does it for the heck of it sometimes and finds that there are always some minor glitches that crop up immediately after defragging... hmmm, another reason why i hardly ever do it
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