[crazeazn]

Hi guys, i'm new to the mac scene but im totally enjoying my powerbook. I've used windows boxes for a long time and was wondering if there was a built in or 3rd party defragging program for os x? or is it even necessary? some one mentioned to me that the system automatically does it by itself or something to that nature? thanx a bunch....

[Mr. Blur]

hi....i don't mean to be rude or anything seeing as you are new here....but if you were to search this forum (and perhaps the software forum) using a simple term like "defrag" you will see that this subject has been covered time and time again.....please search before creating a new thread.

[chabig]

But the answer is that it's not necessary. Welcome to Mac. Enjoy life without adware, spyware, and viruses. You'll actually get stuff done.

[ibobunot]

thats the best thing about os x i don't have to pay the norton tax every year.

[chabig]

crazeazn, speaking of Norton--DO NOT buy, try, or in any way install any Norton product on your Mac, regardless of what you did on the PC. The Mac product causes more problems than it solves.

Chris

[Millennium]

Originally posted by chabig:
crazeazn, speaking of Norton--DO NOT buy, try, or in any way install any Norton product on your Mac, regardless of what you did on the PC. The Mac product causes more problems than it solves.

This was, by the way, not always true. Back in the OS9 days, Norton was one of the best utilities in its class, for any platform. After the release of OSX, however, even their OS9 releases (they still did one or two after OSX came about) suffered horribly. No one really knows why it happened, but they're one of several products where the writer seems to have just plain given up once OSX was released. See Virex and AppleWorks for other examples.

By the way, defragging is still necessary on OSX, but because OSX automatically defragments small files for you it should be needed far less often. Maybe once every year or two. When you do need it, Alsoft's DiskWarrior is generally accepted as the best tool out there.

[larkost]

Millennium I will disagree with you on that one. I was supporting Macs at a large university at that point, and whenever we had a computer with Norton Utilities come in we knew we were in for a difficult problem. It may have solved some small problems, but it wound up creating lots of big ones.

And defragging is not necessary unless you are very close to filling your hard drive (in which case you have other problems. fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing... it is only when it gets out of control that it causes problems. With the way Apple's HFS+ driver allocates blocks, and the auto-defragger this will not happen in %99 of all cases.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by larkost:
Millennium I will disagree with you on that one. I was supporting Macs at a large university at that point, and whenever we had a computer with Norton Utilities come in we knew we were in for a difficult problem. It may have solved some small problems, but it wound up creating lots of big ones.

When was this? Honest question. From all I've experienced and heard, all of the Norton releases prior the release of OSX were pretty good. I may be off by a release or two, but they were once quite reputable.

[BuonRotto]

To make a long story short, Mac OS X writes to the largest block it can find for the file to begin with, it doesn't scatter files into fragments nearly as much as Windows and has a kind of "hot access" area where it keeps files that are recently created or used often so access will be faster. Also, OS X will defrag a file on the fly if it's small enough and if it's fragmented enough. It doesn't make as much sense to defrag really large files in many cases due to the design of more current hard drive platters. You'll be hard pressed to find fragmentation beyond 5% on almost any OS X volume unless it contains absolutely HUGE files or unless the hard drive is almost full. Even then, it shouldn't come close to the 30%+ fragmentation you see regularly with Windows filesystems. Even on Windows, the filesystems and hard drive technologies are usually good enough to compensate or negate the effects of minor to moderate fragmentation.

Here are some links to good debates/discussions about defragmenting in Mac OS X:

http://community.sonikmatter.com/cgi...;f=25;t=000318

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/10/30/1942232.shtml

Remember also that defragmenting puts data at some risk for being lost or corrupted.

[wataru]

If you do a search, you'll find a long thread about defragging. All I have to say about it is this: I defrag every couple months. Every time I do, Drive 10 reports several thousands of file and free space fragments. I do not to anything out of the ordinary on my computer, so I believe that this is likely the case for many people. Given that, defragging is clearly not handled satisfactorily by the system, so you might want to give it a shot.

Edit: I just analyzed my disk with Drive 10. It found 5,342 file fragments, and 11,874 disk fragments. It's probably been 3 or 4 months since I last defragmented. My hard drive has 4.45 out of 37.25GB free (88% full), although about 1GB of that is swap.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Millennium:
This was, by the way, not always true. Back in the OS9 days, Norton was one of the best utilities in its class, for any platform. After the release of OSX, however, even their OS9 releases (they still did one or two after OSX came about) suffered horribly. No one really knows why it happened, but they're one of several products where the writer seems to have just plain given up once OSX was released. See Virex and AppleWorks for other examples.

Uhh... more like the System 7 days. Since Mac OS 8, Norton Utilities have been horrible. (Norton AntiVirus was fine.) Maybe you forgot about Disk Doctor 3 hosing HFS+ disks before it was updated. Or Disk Doctor 4 causing more damage than it fixed, or Norton Utilities 4's "Crash Guard" being directly responsible for far more crashes than it could help you recover from. Or Disk Doctor 5 causing more damage than it fixed, and not being able to even scan large disks. How about Disk Doctor 7's inability to work with Journaled HFS+ volumes? (No, it didn't fail gracefully like, say the then-two-years-old DiskWarrior 2; no, it caused a kernel panic.)

There's a reason we call it Norton Disk Doctor Kevorkian.

Ever since Norton Utilities lost its main competitor (whose name I have forgotten) back in 1994 or so, it's gone straight downhill. Norton's name recognition kept the product popular with the average joe, but the really knowledgeable Mac people had given up on it long ago in lieu of Alsoft's products.

Note also that Norton Utilities for Mac was recently discontinued -- finally.

tooki

[Millennium]

Originally posted by tooki:
Uhh... more like the System 7 days. Since Mac OS 8, Norton Utilities have been horrible. (Norton AntiVirus was fine.) Maybe you forgot about Disk Doctor 3 hosing HFS+ disks before it was updated. Or Disk Doctor 4 causing more damage than it fixed, or Norton Utilities 4's "Crash Guard" being directly responsible for far more crashes than it could help you recover from. Or Disk Doctor 5 causing more damage than it fixed, and not being able to even scan large disks. How about Disk Doctor 7's inability to work with Journaled HFS+ volumes? (No, it didn't fail gracefully like, say the then-two-years-old DiskWarrior 2; no, it caused a kernel panic.)

OK; it looks like my timeline is off, then. My bad.

Ever since Norton Utilities lost its main competitor (whose name I have forgotten) back in 1994 or so, it's gone straight downhill. Norton's name recognition kept the product popular with the average joe, but the really knowledgeable Mac people had given up on it long ago in lieu of Alsoft's products.

Norton's main competitor was Symantec's MacTools, and I remember it vaguely. If I recall correctly, Symantec purchased the maker of Norton (whose name I don't even remember anymore) and then co-opted the Norton brand name.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Millennium:
When was this? Honest question. From all I've experienced and heard, all of the Norton releases prior the release of OSX were pretty good.

I guess you don't read the software forum here. People have been reporting long-standing problems with Norton for years. I've pretty much only heard lousy Mac techs praise Norton -- all the really knowledgeable ones invariably use DiskWarrior as their front-line defense.

In fact, there are some very rare and obscure HFS+ directory problems that Norton can fix better than DiskWarrior. In practice, DiskWarrior is a vastly superior tool. If you do encounter one of those rare cases where DiskWarrior can't help, then Norton is worth a shot. (Note than in 12 years of being a full-time Mac user, I've never encountered such a case myself, though I have heard of them.)

I may be off by a release or two, but they were once quite reputable.

Yup. But it's been over 7 years since then. Pretty much every release after 3.5 has had some serious problem.

For example: When I was working back at a Mac shop in Switzerland in 1999, we sold Norton Utilities 4. I would always warn purchasers to not install the new Crash Guard feature (or to disable it after installing). Invariably, we'd get a phone call about an hour later, telling us that they installed Norton and now their computer is crashing left and right. I would ask them "Did you remove Crash Guard?" - "Well, no." - "Well, remove it [I tell them how to trash the extension], then call me back." Another hour later, they'd call back to say that trashing it had, indeed fixed the crashing. Crash Guard disappeared in Norton 5 and never came back. IIRC, the initial release of Norton 4 had serious data loss problems, which a minor update fixed.

Norton has a long history of "finding" non-existent problems on clean disks, and then offering to fix them. When you do, you actually cause disk damage at worse, or nothing at best. Run the scan again, and guess what? It "finds" the same "problems" again!

tooki

[tooki]

Originally posted by Millennium:
OK; it looks like my timeline is off, then. My bad.

Norton's main competitor was Symantec's MacTools, and I remember it vaguely. If I recall correctly, Symantec purchased the maker of Norton (whose name I don't even remember anymore) and then co-opted the Norton brand name.

Yes, it was MacTools! But it wasn't from Symantec originally, it was from Central Point Software (which Symantec acquired 4 years after buying Norton). There was also one more utility which decided not to make the jump to HFS+ and just died off. I can't remember its name, either.

As for Norton... that was the name of the company (well, Peter Norton Computing, Inc.).

There was another utility, also bought by Symantec, which was Fifth Generation Systems' Public Utilities.

I also just found reference to some utility called Superset Utilities, from DataWatch (the company that originally developed Virex). There's not much record of this product online.

So the upshot of it was that Symantec bought 3 or 4 of the biggest Mac utilities, killed off all but Norton, and with less competition, let Norton languish (as far as quality). In fact, Symantec hasn't really ever developed anything original, they've just bought up others and adopted their names. (Symantec was originally C&E Software; they later bought a dinky company called Symantec and adopted their name along with their flagship product.)

tooki

P.S. Does anyone else here remember when Norton Antivirus for Mac was still called "SAM"? (That was Symantec Antivirus for Macintosh, for those of you too young to remember!) Similarly, Norton Utilities was originally "SUM".

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Millennium:
By the way, defragging is still necessary on OSX, but because OSX automatically defragments small files for you it should be needed far less often. Maybe once every year or two. When you do need it, Alsoft's DiskWarrior is generally accepted as the best tool out there.

DiskWarrior is definitely an excellent tool, and certainly something that everyone should have. However, it doesn't defragment files. It defragments the directory structures and fixes problems with them.

Alsoft used to make DiskExpress, which was widely regarded as the best optimizer for the Mac. However, they never updated it for HFS+ for some reason, and their other defragger, PlusOptimizer, never got updated for OS X. Oh well, like most have said, defrag isn't as necessary with OS X, which is why most of the defraggers for OS 9 haven't been updated. I used to defrag my disk with Norton until Norton ended up hosing one of my drives and since then I haven't defragged for several years, and haven't had any problems yet.

If you really need defrag for some reason, your only choice at the moment is TechTool Pro. However, it's quite slow...

[P]

Totally TAN, but since the history was brought up...

First, there were lots of bad programs and three good ones: Norton Utilities for MAcintosh (NUM), Symantec Utilities for Macintosh (SUM) and Central Point Mactools. Symantec in turn bought out both of its competitors, but before this the amalgamation of Norton Utilities and SUM became a pretty good program. Without competition, and with a pretty solid product (NUM 3), Symantec quit developing and spent its time fiddling with the interface and the help system (OK, not only. They added System Info, which was useful before Apple System Profiler, worked on some Undo features and added special repair filters for more well-known document formats, but Disk Doctor itself didn't improve much).

Then, two things happened. Apple got out from under the Copland cloud and started putting Copland features minor updates. HFS+ was the biggest, but there were more, and Symantec had to start working again. Only problem was, they didn't have any good people left, and Peter Norton himself had quit. More or less the same happened on the PC side, so NU became crap there too. Symantec focused on Antivirus, put out some prettty good programs there and made obscene amounts of money off of it. They expanded into firewalls (and intrusion detection) on Windows, and made more good software. I sort of miss that interface on a Mac firewall. It's the type of thing a newbie can understand without being too limited.

The NU of the post 8.1-era is mainly this: If you have one of the cases that the developers thought of, then Disk Doctor will fix it quickly. If you don't, Disk Doctor will almost always improve the situation a little bit, but on occasion it will think it knows what is happening and totally ruin the disk and any chance of getting it back. After the arrival of X, the possible bad choices are so many that your chance of ruining the disk is much too large to bother with Disk Doctor. Speed Disk is irrelevant, (see we're back on topic! for a second, anyway), and the rest of the disk repair stuff is mostly handled by catalouging anyway. Unerase is no longer possible. Wiping files is built-in, along with system information stuff. The benchmarking was always crap. I sort of miss Disk Editor, and Disk light was also nice (though Menumeters does something similar, and without all the conflicts) but the rest... Nah. Disk repair tools are a thing of the past. The way of this millenium is to have the OS handle this sort of thing: prevent and repair as necessary.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by tooki:
P.S. Does anyone else here remember when Norton Antivirus for Mac was still called "SAM"? (That was Symantec Antivirus for Macintosh, for those of you too young to remember!) Similarly, Norton Utilities was originally "SUM".

I remember SAM but I do not remember SUM. I wasn't much of a computer fixer back in high school as much as I just did my own thing. So I only have vague memories of the tools back then.

[UnixMac]

no one is mentioning TechTool Pro (which I believe is also Drive 10 merged in there).

Are they any good? or is Diskwarrier better? I ask because Apple chose Techtool Delux (basically the old Drive 10) as their bundle utility.

I have techtool pro 4.0.3 and find it easy to use, but I'm no sure of how good a job it does, since I've had some odd behavior from my OS X installation that leads me to believe that my using techtool pro actually caused problems rather than solved them, or prevented them.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by UnixMac:
no one is mentioning TechTool Pro (which I believe is also Drive 10 merged in there).

Are they any good? or is Diskwarrier better? I ask because Apple chose Techtool Delux (basically the old Drive 10) as their bundle utility.

I have techtool pro 4.0.3 and find it easy to use, but I'm no sure of how good a job it does, since I've had some odd behavior from my OS X installation that leads me to believe that my using techtool pro actually caused problems rather than solved them, or prevented them.

TechTool Pro is not as good as DiskWarrior at fixing disk problems. It is handy sometimes, though, for its hardware test features, plus defragging if you need it.

This is how the three major disk repair utilities measure up, using my Smiley Rating System™:

DiskWarrior: 5 Smileys ( )

TechTool Pro: 3 Smileys ( )

Norton: 1 Angry Smiley ( )

[tooki]

TechTool Pro is a jack of all trades, master of none. Its disk scanning (which in version 4 is basically the same as Drive 10, which bizarrely has not been discontinued) is lackluster, IMHO. TTP's hardware tests are handy, but no OS-based hardware tests are ever as effective as special test software that runs in place of the OS.

This article pretty much explains them.

TechTool Deluxe is not the same as Drive 10 -- the former does check hardware, but it won't attempt to do disk repairs -- you need Pro to do that.

tooki

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by tooki:
TTP's hardware tests are handy, but no OS-based hardware tests are ever as effective as special test software that runs in place of the OS.

That may be, but it saved me some time once by detecting bad RAM on a Mac that had been crashing irreproducibly during the clone era.

Regarding the disk repair feature, though, I generally agree with you. It seems that when a disk gets damaged much at all, TTP tends to not even detect the disk. Now, I'd take that over Norton, which tends to make problems worse, but DiskWarrior is far and away the best if you want your disk to actually get fixed.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
...I used to defrag my disk with Norton until Norton ended up hosing one of my drives and since then I haven't defragged for several years, and haven't had any problems yet.

If you really need defrag for some reason, your only choice at the moment is TechTool Pro. However, it's quite slow...

I've had far better luck with speed disk than ttp4. TechTool Pro is incapable of crashing or being killed gracefully in the middle of a defrag. I've never had this problem with Speed Disk.

If for some reason TTP4 gets killed without its permission, your directory structure is hosed. I HIGHLY recommend only using TTP4 for defrag if you have a current backup.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by tooki:
TechTool Pro is a jack of all trades, master of none. Its disk scanning (which in version 4 is basically the same as Drive 10, which bizarrely has not been discontinued) is lackluster, IMHO. TTP's hardware tests are handy, but no OS-based hardware tests are ever as effective as special test software that runs in place of the OS.

This article pretty much explains them.

TechTool Deluxe is not the same as Drive 10 -- the former does check hardware, but it won't attempt to do disk repairs -- you need Pro to do that.

tooki

TTP is excellent for for hard drive hardware checks--it's your only option for a surface scan. Fortunately, it does that very well.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Detrius:
TTP is excellent for for hard drive hardware checks--it's your only option for a surface scan. Fortunately, it does that very well.

Agreed. Back in the days when I used to use floppies a lot, TTP often caught bad blocks in them that Norton missed.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Detrius:
If for some reason TTP4 gets killed without its permission, your directory structure is hosed. I HIGHLY recommend only using TTP4 for defrag if you have a current backup.

If you've already got a backup, then you could defragment by just wiping the original disk and then restoring from the backup, no defragger needed!

tooki

[utidjian]

Originally posted by tooki:
If you've already got a backup, then you could defragment by just wiping the original disk and then restoring from the backup, no defragger needed!

I was gonna mention that one... but you beat me to it.

In the "old days" one method (the only method?) for defragging Unix filesystems was to dump everything to tape and then wipe the disk and restore everything from tape. This would ensure that all the files were written to contiguous blocks. As you said... this will still work today... just copy everything to another HDD, format the original, then copy everything back.

This technique will not, however, do anything about "optimizing" the exact placement of files and folders. It is unclear what, if anything, the commercial utilities do about "optimizing".

[tooki]

Mac OS X already does hot-file clustering, which means that the commonly-used files are moved to the fastest part of the disk.

tooki

[utidjian]

Originally posted by tooki:
Mac OS X already does hot-file clustering, which means that the commonly-used files are moved to the fastest part of the disk.

Would that placement of files be preserved when copied?

[tooki]

No. Hot-file clustering is strictly managed by the OS. It automatically puts hot files in, and evicts others. The user has no control.

tooki