Do You Defragment?
I’ve never defragmented any of my Mac hard drives. I figure I’d wait until my Mac started feeling slow and bloated, then I’d spring the big bucks to get a hard drive utility. Fortunately, that event has yet to occur.
In the June issue of Maximum PC, they did a performance study of various disk defraggers for Windows. In the end the performance gains from these applications basically amounted to a zero. In many cases, there were negative performance gains.
What does this mean on the Mac side? I’ve heard that the OS X file system is less susceptible to fragmentation problems (correct me if I’m wrong). And from personal experience I tend to agree with this statement. This magazine article just further reinforces my negative opinions of disk defraggers.
I plan on using my Core 2 Duo Macbook for at least a couple more years. We’ll see if this theory holds up. Do you defragment your hard drive? Have you noticed any performance gains?
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Comment by TheGeek
Well I’ve had my Mac for about three months now and I have no plans to buy any type of disc defragmenter. You are correct that the Mac File System is less prone to disc fragmentation then windows NTFS as it tries find a space that the file will fit instead of the first empty space.
As for doing disc defrag on Windows box I always saw some improvement after a defrag and the last year or two before I switched to Mac was running Diskeeper to keep the drive defraged at almost all times.
Comment by Antares
I did it a few times, when I had my Windows laptop. But I never noticed some performance improvements. Now I newer bother to do it.
Comment by Daniel Schlaug
Defragmenting a Mac OS X drive could do more harm than good as OS X handles this automatically. There are tools to do this in customized ways but I’d say they’re for poweruser knowing exactly what they to rather than your average windows-accustomed user. I’d suppose this is also why defragmentation is not built into OSX’s DiskUtility.
Comment by ron~
I have my mac for 1 and a half year now, and I feel my mac is not as fast as it used to be, but not sure if it’s caused by fragmentation issue…
Comment by Daniel Schlaug
Tried the chores? Repair permissions, delete caches. Of course some background app could also be at fault.