[cutlassvillager]

I am going to replace the factory 80 gig hard drive in my 1st gen MacBook Pro. I bought a WD Scorpio Black 320 GB hard drive (WD3200BEKT) with an external enclosure. My original plan was to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old hard drive to the new one. Will using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive defragment the information as well? My understanding is that a block-level copy will keep the information fragmented, so I should make sure it does a file-level copy. Would it be better to use restore in disk utility, a backup from Time Machine, or SuperDuper! instead?

Thank you!

[CharlesS]

The easiest and probably best way to do it is to use Disk Utility's Restore tab. Check the "Erase destination" check box if you want to do a block copy, leave it blank if you prefer a regular file copy.

[cutlassvillager]

Sounds Good. Thanks for the quick response! The hard drive should arrive tomorrow.

[Simon]

I'll second CharlesS' suggestion. DiskUtility > Restore is the safest and fastest way to make a clone. It's free too.

If you are booted from the old drive when you do the restore, you will get a file copy in any case. Block copies are only performed when the drive can be unmounted, which the boot partition obviously can't.

Also, don't worry too much about file fragmentation. If your drive has enough free space OS X will automatically defragment files when it becomes necessary. Upgrading to a new drive with lots of free space should solve any fragmentation issues you might be having.