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	[x] Attachment Details

how can i defragment my mac os x hardrive without norton???

Zones: Apple Operating Systems, Mac OS 10.1 (Cheetah), Mac OS 10.3 (Panther)

Tags: mac, defrag, os, x

i have recently gotten jaguar, mac os 10.2, and am very happy with it. however, i cannot now and never have been able to figure out how to defragment my hard drive. I do not have the norton utilities on cd, i have downloaded them and tried them without having a cd version and it does not work. I was wondering if there is anything else that i can do, is there another program or do i have to breakdown and buy norton utilities?

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Question Stats

Zone: Apple

Question Asked By: enginerd

Solution Provided By: arioso

Participating Experts: 19

Solution Grade: B

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Open Discussion

Comment by phoenix_elite

I see absolutely no reason to defrag a mac running OS X. I myself have NEVER done it and have had no problems whatsoever. So, to answer your question, you don't.

Comment by navyjax2

If DiskWarrior wasn't defragmenting the drive when the utility is ran and the graph displayed when using that function (granted it's been a while since I've ran it and don't remember what they call that function within the program to click on), what would be the purpose of showing the individual blocks being re-organized and re-colored? I'd have to wonder that very seriously if it wasn't actually defragmenting anything, as it wouldn't have a point to be doing that if all it were doing was optimizing the drive.

I do have to agree with yoxi - I've seen a Mac or two that wouldn't boot after their drives became close to full (less than 5 GB free), and had to take another drive, image it, and put the old data onto the new drive, when nothing was wrong with the old drive except for the OS boot issue, which we didn't find out later until running some disk diagnostics. I've seen drives that had 20 GB free one day have only 5 GB free the next day, and not because they had 15 GB of files they copied onto the computer or created themselves. The only thing I can come up with is yoxi's theory of disk fragmentation, which makes complete sense the way he described it, to me.

Comment by rodhagen

Diskwarrior is simply defragging the directories / catalog files, navyjax2. (which is a worthwhile thing in itself, but doesn't help with problems of free space or regular file fragmentation). It is not uncommon, in fact, to get a message from DW that the directories can't be defragged because there is not enough contiguous (ie all in one block) space for it to perform this function , if the drive is close to full.

One difficult thing with the "defrag or not" arguments is that it is difficult to pin an absolute figure on the point where the problems occur. Large drives, for example, need more contiguous space for various essential catalog and extents files, than smaller ones. User factors enter into the equation , too. If you regularly deal with DVD burns or video generally you will need more free space, and more ferquent defragging , to avoid problems than if you simply run a word processor and deal with email. A good rule of thumb for most users, though, is to never let your drive get to the point where you have only 10% free space, regardless of drive size, and to defrag regularly once you get below about 20% free space. Video / DVD pundits may need to double these figures, though.

Cheers

Rod

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