[silentfeet]

I am interested in purchasing a defrag app. for Tiger 10.4.3. Any constructive recommendations will be greatly appreciated. I am considering Drive Genius by Prosoft, or Techtools by Micromat. I have also recently purchased Diskwarrior v3.0.3 by Alsoft. Thanks to all who contribute their recommendations.

[jasong]

I recommend not defragging.

[MacMatt]

Originally Posted by silentfeet

I am interested in purchasing a defrag app. for Tiger 10.4.3. Any constructive recommendations will be greatly appreciated. I am considering Drive Genius by Prosoft, or Techtools by Micromat. I have also recently purchased Diskwarrior v3.0.3 by Alsoft. Thanks to all who contribute their recommendations.

It's a little slow, but TechTool Pro 4 works well for me...Plus it has an abundance of other maintenance features.

Matt

[CaptainHaddock]

There's no need to defragment a Mac. The HFS+ filesystem does defragmenting and optimization on the fly.

[silentfeet]

Originally Posted by jasong

I recommend not defragging.

Jason,

What are your reasons for recommending not to defrag?

[silentfeet]

Thank you Matt, Jason, and CaptainHaddock for your input. I have read differing opinions as to whether there is a need to defrag a Mac. I direct those interested one of the learned opinions I recently read:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=159812

I will welcome your thoughts on what this person wrote concerning the defrag question.

Thanks again to all who contribute their thoughts on this topic.



P.S. - BTW, I do not know how to incorporate html language in my posts. My apologies to you advanced users.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by silentfeet

Thank you Matt, Jason, and CaptainHaddock for your input. I have read differing opinions as to whether there is a need to defrag a Mac. I direct those interested one of the learned opinions I recently read:

<http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=159812>

From reading the discussion you linked to, it seems though defragging will probably lead to temporary performance loss and then maybe temporary performance gains in the future. Not worth it IMO.

If you're editing lots of video, though, then that could be a different story.

[analogika]

If you're editing lots of video, though, you're probably storing that on a dedicated drive, which again would make defragmenting completely pointless.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by silentfeet

JWhat are your reasons for recommending not to defrag?

Read the opinion of an engineer who wrote a disk defragger: Optimizing Disks Is a Waste of Time.
Also note that Tiger does automatically defrag the file system.

[jasong]

Look at it this way, these programs take 3 hours to defrag your HD. During that time you cannot use your computer. What do you get for your 3 hours? "faster start times and Finder processes seem to be a bit snappier." Let's say your start times are now twice as fast, let's say it now takes 30 seconds to start your computer instead of 1 minute. Assuming you shut down and start up your computer every day, you've now saved yourself 3 minutes and 30 seconds a week, 14 minutes a month, or 168 minutes (almost 3 hours) a year. We also have the possible extra snappiness of the Finder. If the best that can be said is "seems to be a bit snappier" how much time does this save? Let's say it gives you the same performance benefit as starting up, so over the course of 1 year, you save just under 3 hours. Wow, for your 3 hours of time, you save 5.5 hours! Totally worth it, right? Of course the fragmentation will build up again before one year is up, so these performance gains will require you to defrag again. Maybe quarterly defrags? So for 12 hours of defragging time per year, you can save about 3 hours.

so we get:
-3
-3
-3
-3
+3
= -9

That's why I say it's a waste. You could make $1000/hour and still never recover your investment in the defragging software.

[ShotgunEd]

OSX doesn't auto defrag all files, only files over 20MB, iirc, but thats beside the point.

You don't need to do any more.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by ShotgunEd

OSX doesn't auto defrag all files, only files over 20MB

*under* 20MB

[silentfeet]

Thank you to all who contributed to this thread. It helped make up my mind about defragmenting, not to mention saving me valuable time and unnecesary expense purchasing defragging software. Jason, your explanation was especially convincing. Thank you. Also, I did read the article that Tetenal directed me to. Thanks Tetenal, and again my appreciation to you all. Happy Holidays!

[ShotgunEd]

Originally Posted by analogika

*under* 20MB

You are right.

Apple say this

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

A topic at Speedtools says this

http://www.speedtools.com/cgi-bin/ib...0;&amp;#entry2

[kcmac]

That speedtools site reply is pretty funny. The Micromat man says to defrag. Go figure.

[Mirddes]

the more often you defrag, reguardless of operating system (im speaking from a windows background), the less time it will take.
i personaly defrag once a day, it takes me abuot 10 seconds per drive.
i also tend to defrage right after ive installed something.
i recently reinstalled abuot 10 games into another location, now that took a while to defrage.
10.7gig abuot no more than 5-10min.

really, if you leave it to once a year or even once every 3months theres not much point.
if you do in once a week or more your defrag times arent gogin to be very long.

please note: ive never used a mac, apart from the few times ive tried them out, im inlove with them(sort of the whole, so great but i cant get).
for windows i mainly use diskeeper, and im playing aroudn with perfect disk right now, which its kinda slow, but apparently is much better at consolidating freespace.

my 2cents.

[Randman]

Get DiskWarrior instead of a defragger. Great insurance policy.