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I move files around a lot my my machine.

The drive goes up and down at least 6-8 GB per week.

Do I need a disk utility such as Disk Warrior on an OS 10.3 drive??

I used it monthly on my old OS 9.1 drive and it did help quite a bit at times.

I would never touch Norton and I am not sure about Drive 10.

Panther has been out for a spell now so what is the word on keeping it running smooth besides a permission reset?

as i understand it, if a drive is journaled under panther, then files above 20megs in size are automatically defragged by the OS. however, if you want to defrag all files or optimize file placement, you'll need to use a 3rd party app...just make sure you use apple's disk utility to disable journaling before attempting to optimize.

i've used micromat's drive 10 and techtool 4 with panther....both without incident.

Actually TechTool Pro 4 doesn't allow you to optimize a drive that is journaled. You need to unjournal it first in TTP4 then optimize then re-journal the drive. Setup the edrive it makes life simpler than having to boot from the CD.

DiskWarrior doesn't defragment, nor did it ever do so.

It is, however, the best directory maintenance utility out there, and I do recommend running it regularly.

tooki

I second that!

No but Disk Optimizer did and that used to come free with Disk Warrior.

I think it's Plus Optimizer that came with DiskWarrior. It worked as well as Norton's Speed Disk in improving my OS 9 startup times and app loading times. I don't think it comes with DiskWarrior anymore - not enough benefit to be worth the licensing costs, I guess. But jeez, they still charge $80 for DiskWarrior! www.alsoft.com

From an older thread at Macintouch:

Defragmentation on OS X 10.3

From what I have been reading, the Darwin Gurus say that there are actually two separate file optimizations going on in Panther.

The first one is automatic file defragmentation. When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (ie. 8+ fragments) and the file is under 20MB in size, it will be automatically defragmented. This is accomplished by the file system just moving the file to a new location. This process only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.

The second optimization is called "Adaptive Hot File Clustering". In general, it works like this: over a period of 60 hours, the file system keeps track of files that are read frequently (for a file to be considered as a hot-file, it must be less than 10MB and never written to). At the end of this period, the "hottest" files (ie. the files that have been read the most times) are moved to the "hotband" of the disk (which is that part of the disk which is particularly fast given the physical characteristics of the disk).

The size of the "hotband" will depend on the size of the disk (ie. 5MB of hotband space for each GB of disk). "Cold" files that were in the hotband will be moved out of the hotband to make room for the hot files. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, the hot files are defragmented.

Currently, Adaptive Hot File Clustering only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes that are more than 10GB.

why I heard some rumors about no need for disk defragment in Panther?!

Actually, one of the easiest ways to defrag your hard drive in OS X is to simply copy the drive to an external/internal drive and then copy it back. This defrags all of the files.

Your idea is really simple!>

From Apple:

OS 10 Disk Optimization

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

"For most users there is little benefit to defragging ... however ... if your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files, there's a chance they could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation."

From all I have read, the users most likely to benefit from defragging are video editors and users who regulary work with a number of large files over 20MB.