Directory Fragmentation: It’s Real
Directory fragmentation is very much an issue with Macs, as the first screenshot below clearly indicates. While I make sure to perform routine Mac maintenance on my desktop system, it had been several months since I last performed the same tasks on my notebook system (a Macbook Pro).
Below is the directory structure for the same drive after running Alsoft’s Disk Warrior tool.
At present, I’m running Coriolis System’s iDefrag to take care of the file fragmentation on my computer. Below is the current progress (started this evening):
I’ve used DiskWarrior and iDefrag for several years now and would highly recommend them both for any Mac user looking for a solid arsenal of quality Mac utilities.
-Krishna
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Tell me what you think!
qka
April 9, 2011 at 12:43 amI’ve been using iDefrag for several years. It does what it says it will do; I’ve no complaints.
There is a new version out in the past few months that i have not upgraded to. The to defrag a boot volume with the old version, you had to boot from another device. (I used my cloned boot disk backup.) The new version supposedly will allow you to defrag the volume you booted from, which sounds sweet.
Icid
April 9, 2011 at 8:21 amThanks! I was looking for some good apps to do this. Does it matter which I run first?
Krishna
April 9, 2011 at 8:50 amGood question – I’m not sure whether order of operation matters in this case – but Disk Warrior takes a few minutes to run, while iDefrag takes a few hours (depending upon how badly fragmented your files are).
Giridhar
April 9, 2011 at 10:43 amDepends on the status of you hard drive and the kind of defrag you’re going to perform.
1. Run Disk Utility, Verify Disk if there are errors and you don’t own Disk Warrior, boot with OSX disk, run disk utility and repair disk
2. Run Disk Warrior if you own it and repair the disk.
3. Optional, Disk Utility – Repair Permissions. A little housekeeping is nice.
4. Run iDefrag.
I like running a Full Defrag after every service pack to keep hotfiles and libraries nice and tidy.
Best Regards
qka
April 9, 2011 at 3:06 pmHow long iDefrag takes to run depends on what you set it to do. Simply defrag the files that it can in currently available free spac? Not very long. Rearrange your disk so that all files are defragged, as well as maximally defrag free space, also while rearranging files in optimal locations on the disk for OS X? Yeah, that’s going to take a while – a long while.
Another no cost option for defragging is make a clone copy, then wipe the original, and clone it from the copy. All files will defragged, although they may or may not be arranged optimally on the disk.
WARNING: all the usual caveats about making sure your backup procedures work as intended ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY APPLY when doing this!
Bartimaeus
November 18, 2011 at 5:29 amHeh. I remember the days when the utility du jour was Norton Speed Disk…