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Mark E · Jul 13, 2003, 07:28 PM

my girlfriend has a 600mhz g3 ibook. she's had it for over 2 years, and in that time has reinstalled OS X, formatted the hard drive, imported video, etc etc etc, several times.. now it seems to be running dog-slow.

i think defragging would help solve the problem - she has 640 MB ram so i don't think it's particularly a ram issue.

any ideas?

thanks!

-Mark

bleee · Jul 13, 2003, 08:04 PM

Originally posted by Mark E:
my girlfriend has a 600mhz g3 ibook. she's had it for over 2 years, and in that time has reinstalled OS X, formatted the hard drive, imported video, etc etc etc, several times.. now it seems to be running dog-slow.

i think defragging would help solve the problem - she has 640 MB ram so i don't think it's particularly a ram issue.

any ideas?

thanks!

-Mark

OS X does not come with a standard disk defrag program unlike windows comes with a standard defrag. I recently bought disk warrior it reorganizes files/directories, my friend and I both agree that our iBooks are faster after a defrag but before you go out and spend the cash you might want to try running a repair permissions from disk utility.

engaged · Jul 14, 2003, 02:15 AM

Also, try running fsck in single user mode.

(Restart, hold down command-s, and type '/sbin/fsck -y', repeating until you don't get any errors.)

radarbob · Jul 14, 2003, 08:41 AM

IMHO, defragging is irrelevant these days given the speed and native formatting of hard drives and computer speed. In my experience over the years (more than 20 so far) defrag has slowly become a non-player in performance issues. No scientic evidence in my pocket to back that up, just observation.

I recall defragging making a big difference for saving space on our Z-120, circa 1984, running an intel chip set (in the 2 - 4 MHz range I want to remember) and CP/M operating system with a 5 MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive (and the best keyboard on any computer ever). By reorganizing fragmented files, noticeable, significant amounts of disk space was recovered.

If you were around when Apple went to their current hard drive format (OS 8.0) you will recall many folks reporting saving megabytes due to the more efficient format. Defragging had nothing to do with that.

ccsccs7 · Jul 15, 2003, 03:44 AM

Originally posted by radarbob:

If you were around when Apple went to their current hard drive format (OS 8.0) you will recall many folks reporting saving megabytes due to the more efficient format. Defragging had nothing to do with that.

Oops. Mac OS 8.1.

darcybaston · Jul 15, 2003, 09:34 AM

I think defragging really only makes a speed difference proportionate to how much free space is left when what you use every day got put on the drive.

Defragging a drive with 20 gigs free doesn't make as much sense as one with 1 gig free, because the 20 gigs free is plenty of room to create contiguous save blocks on the HD.

A drive with only 1 gig free will have a smaller probability of contiguous free blocks for write operations and that would make the drive jump all over the place finding a free block here and there for one file. That makes it thrash around and get really slow. (same with loading the data; remember that the drive head introduces latency and pauses the more it has to move)

Not sure about virtual ram, but I think the Unix underpinnings in X make sure that the swap drive is all together without having to jump around like from the insides to the outsisdes of the hard disks' platters. I know Windows does this to some degree, marking the parts of the hard drive with the sectors for virtual ram as 'reserved and cannot be moved' during defrag operations.

This is old knowledge in my head.

Let me know if it's changed since I last absorbed it? Thanks!

pat++ · Jul 15, 2003, 11:57 AM

I noticed that defraging helps a lot on my iBook 500, particularly after having installed several OS X updates (which is probably your case)....

rytc · Jul 16, 2003, 06:09 AM

Originally posted by pat++:
I noticed that defraging helps a lot on my iBook 500, particularly after having installed several OS X updates (which is probably your case)....

What have you been using? Norton Disk doctor? or Diskwarrior?

darrenlim · Aug 11, 2003, 09:46 PM

I have a 700MHz 14" 384 MB 30 GB iBook for almost a year now. After acculmulating junk of MP3s and digital photos, the free space of the drive dwindled to less than 2 GB.

The mac became very slow.. constantly seeing the spinning beachball. Recently bought a Seagate 120GB drive mounted in an external firewire enclosure. Moved the files off and did a defrag of the internal drive.

I must say that the mac is much more responsive after defrag. Just like it was when new. Used Norton Utilities. Boot off the external drive to do the defragging.

Highly recommend to any slow running iBook.

sniffer · Aug 12, 2003, 01:03 AM

Also try to create a new user account, log into it, and see if there is a difference. I often find old accounts to be a bit slower sometimes. But that's naturally due to heavy usage over time ->more crap in the Library folder etc.
I have the same machine btw and have never noticed any needs for defrag IMO. But that's just me.

-Q- · Aug 12, 2003, 01:16 PM

You don't state how much HDD space is left in the iBook. I'm betting the suggestions related to diminishing disk space have something to do with the slowdown (more swapping--even with 640 MB of RAM, some swapping will occur) than a fragmented disk.