![]() ![]() Of course, the defrag probably took so long since the drive has NEVER been defragged before. This is the Apple recommended method of "optimizing" the hard drive. Perhaps it would have been faster to just move my programs and files off of the system, format it, then re-install everything. I'm not positive, as I just started it and left to go do something else. The system boots faster, applications load a bit faster, etc. I'm not sure why so many people claim you don't need to defrag a Mac, but obviously the system sure seems to be booting a lot faster. I shut down again and and powered back on a few more times, always timing how long it took for the system to power on, fully load, and load Firefox.Īverage boot time AFTER a defrag: 1 minute, 5 seconds. I shut down completely, then powered back on. After it finished, I ran some more boot tests. Simple enough I figured.įirst, I timed my average boot before the defrag: 1 minute, 48 seconds. I timed how long it took to load, from the second I pushed the Power button, until the second everything was loaded and Firefox said "Done." in the bottom-left of the browser. My Firefox start page is the default Google one. No other applications were listed in under my account to auto start. I removed my password, set Mac OS X to auto login, and then I set Firefox to auto start. Every day I turn on my Mac and wait for things to load so I can check email or websites, so I would test how long it takes to do that. The best test I could think of would be something real-world. I wanted to run some tests to see how much defragging my Mac would speed things up. Here is what it looked like after a defrag: Does the "Macs don't need to be defragged" crowd really think it makes NO impact in performance for my computer to try and load that file each day? Would I really get ZERO benefit from having those files in just ONE piece? Wouldn't the OS load up a bit quicker if system files were in contiguous blocks? Wouldn't Firefox load just a tad quicker if its files weren't in hundreds or thousands of locations all over the hard drive? Some of the bigger files are in 600+ fragments. Tons of "under 20 MB" files were in lots of pieces. ![]() Well, looks like plenty of fragmented files to me. I thought Mac OS X was supposed to auto-defrag things? Keep in mind that * RED * means fragmented files. Just like that 340 Meg hard drive I got in 1994 would never fill up!) Some stupidity about how hard drives in general are so big and so fast, they don't need to be defragged. But no information on when it happens, how to do it manually, etc. Strange information about Mac OS X actually auto-defragging files under 20MB. (And this is easier than just running a defrag?) Apple's own website recommended backing up your applications and files, formatting, re-installing the OS, and then restoring your applications and files if you wanted to restore performance. Macs "don't need to be defragmented" was one thing mentioned over and over and OVER. I couldn't find a lot of good information. Nothing visible under User Accounts.Ģ) I ran fsck and ran a permissions repair. Since it's a Mac, things are a little different.ġ) I checked for startup items. If this were a Windows system, I'd would have done three things on it right away: ![]() Application launching seemed to take forever. Performance on it seemed poorer than I expected it to be. Its hard drive was a Fujitsu 120 Gig, 5400 RPM w/ 8 Megs Cache. True, Mac OS X may work with files better than Windows XP does, but fragmentation still happens. ![]() I've seen many Mac users claim that Macs don't suffer from fragmentation. And they suffer the same performance degradation caused by hard drive fragmentation. Macs use the same hardware Windows PC use. MyDefrag (was JkDefrag), Defraggler, Auslogic's Defrag, Contig, and Power Defragmenter (a GUI for Contig) are all free defragmentation tools, for Windows. Well, that's how it works in Windows at least. These re-arrange files to put things back together. That's why there are defragging applications. Having one, contiguous block for each file helps the hard drive load the file quicker. So having split-second delays over and over added for every single file access can cause noticeably longer system startup and program launching. It doesn't take too long for the drive to do that with a single file, but your system is usually trying to access dozens or hundreds of files at the same time. Instead of just simply loading your files, your hard drive has to search all over the physical drive surface for the pieces of the file. On a mechanical hard drive, having fragmented files slows things down. They end up in pieces, and new files end up getting broken up as they are written to the free spots between the pieces of the older files. This in inevitable.įiles get written and re-written, added to and moved. Because of how disk storage works, fragmentation happens. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |