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Defragging Files... Particularly large video and media files.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2006
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I use Final Cut pretty extensively... and the media drives and RAID are very fragmented. I use iDefrag for the OS drives (about once a quarter) - I was told that defragging "video" drives are bad...
Is this a hoax and can someone shed some light on this. I feel the drives could benefit from such maintenance. Thanks for any info.
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Toronto, ON
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I was under the impression that OS X handles this for you and you don't need to manually defrag, or use a 3rd party app for defraging.
Anyone know?
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MacBook Pro | 2.16 ghz core2duo | 2gb ram | superdrive | airport extreme
iBook G4 | 1.2ghz | 768mb ram | combodrive | airport extreme
iPhone 3GS | 32 GB | Jailbreak, or no Jailbreak
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: USA
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I was under the impression that defragging a drive isn't as important as it was 10 years ago.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2006
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I have heard OS X handles most of the fragmentation issues.. and I think that is a correct assumption. The OS drives showed little fragmentation....
Although the video drives were highly fragmented. If by chance defragging software is not needed anymore - then by what means does - in this case - iDefrag determine what is fragmented.
I would assume that there would be some sort of performance hike on these drives.
Anyone do video here to verify this claim?
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Mar 2006
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Oh no! Please do a search - this issue has been extensively, and bitterly, discussed to death!
OSX automatically defragments to some extent, and so Apple's advice is that you do not normally need to defrag manually. However, it is possible to get into a situation where it would be helpful to defrag, particularly if your drives are close to full. Bear in mind that this is a religious issue on both sides.
The argument against defragging manually is that there is a chance that you could corrupt the files, and the potential performance gain is rarely worth the time to defrag. If the drive is, indeed, heavily fragmented (and I'm not sure exactly what you mean - do you mean that the free space is fragmented, or that each file is in many fragments?) that may or may not matter. With modern drives having a video file in 10 or so pieces is not the issue it used to be. If it has enough space to do it, OS X will generally keep you on the side of the Angels here.
How full are your drives? Are you noticing any performance issues?
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Last edited by peeb; Feb 13, 2008 at 04:35 PM.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Mar 2008
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I have a VMware Fusion disk image, a file of 37GB, that has 19280 fragments. And another, of around the same size that is in 6680 fragments. So yes, fragmentation can be needed.
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Senior User
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Minnesota
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2010 Mac Mini, 32GB iPod Touch, 2 Apple TV (1)
Home built 12 core 2.93 Westmere PC (almost half the cost of MP) Win7 64.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Dec 2006
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Mar 2004
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Originally Posted by Black_Rain 
It has clock times and all...
Doing a defrag while booted from a CD/DVD [i.e., read-only media] is a bad choice.
The process will go a lot faster if booted from another drive such as a FireWire disk
(or another Mac), with the computer being defragged mounted in Target Disk Mode.
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-HI-
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Mar 2006
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Originally Posted by Black_Rain
This article is utter voodoo - it's entirely bogus.
1. We don't know whether his drive needed de-fragging.
2. He didn't let it finish.
3. He measures app startup times, something which are unlikely to be affected by defragging.
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