[ctpeterson]

I am trying to find ot how to defragment my HD on my iMac 266, I am running 8.6. Is there any OS Software that will allow me to do this? I have never done it and I am hoping that it will speed up my HD a little.

[wlonh]

unless you are a big photoshopper or a NLE DV'er or do sound recording on your Mac OR, in_some_circumstances, if your Mac won't boot then you needn't worry about fragmented disk space

i rarely rarely defrag, and several of the admins here don't either and they know more than me about these matters

what you do need to worry about as do we all is memory fragmentation! and you can search the forums for info on that: memory fragmentation or related keywords... there are quite a few posts on this

[reader50]

Apple does not include a defrag utility in the system software (yet). You have been using your system long enough (1.5 years?) that you might benefit. Lots of arguments about this.

If you have another partition or external storage, you can defrag by copying everything off, erasing, than copying everything back.

Otherwise, the only way is 3rd party utilities. I have yet to find a freeware defragger. "free is good, it means low cost"

[Fredo]

The three most popular utility programs all include defrag features. Norton Utilities includes Speed Disk, Diskwarrior includes Plus Optimizer, and TechTool Pro includes File Optimization.

I defrag monthly, as part of my routine over the past 5 or 6 years.

Was using TechTool Pro for this (still use it for analysis and repair) but have switched to Plus Optimizer because it does it much quicker.

WDL