I’ve needed to partition my disk for a while now, but because of fragmented files I was unable to. The online defrag sped up my computer phenomenally, but it wasn’t quite enough to allow the creation for a partition. Hopefully the full defrag kicks this problem to the curb! I have faith ;D

Georgia out.

I took the leap and bought this software. It was either that or more RAM or a new mac or something. This was not an expensive option. I ran the software inline to start with and noticed a snappier performance. I then took the plunge and made a bootable disc. It was easy to do.

My poor computer took the whole day yesterday running the program.

The result is, my hard drive has been put back together, and it is like having a new machine. BRILLIANT. thanks Paul for this review.

I would strongly recommend this software. The image of my hard drive showed complete chaos. NOW I have order again, and functionality is back.

Chrisp

Loose, is used as in , your shoelaces are loose.

Peace
-stephan

Boot camp assistant should compact the drive in a way that it can fit the e.g. 2gb swap file somewhere in between.

Full backup and restore is not an option for most people. $30 well spent.

Peace
-stephan

Fragmentation occurs due to many many things:

1. Files being deleted, and a file with the EXACT same number of bytes is not put in its place, the file will become fragmented.

2. Virtual Memory/swap file exceeding the pre-sized area on the drive.

3. Application updates.

Correct me if I’m wrong: if there is always enough contiguous space on a drive for a file to be moved to, fragmentation will never occur.

In my case, as I mentioned earlier in my first posting, where I keep all media files including my Itunes Music folder on separate volumes; my main 250 gig drive named by default Macintosh HD contains nothing but Mac OSX Tiger and my applications and related files.

1. boot computer with fragmented drive in target disk mode.
2. use another computer to make image of computer with fragmented drive. Often this requires an external hard drive simply because of the size of the disk image. It is faster if you don’t compress the image. I do, so I can keep the image as a archive.
3. Wipe fragmented drive
4. Re-image fragmented drive with image.
5. Reboot the computer in target disk mode in order to let it start up normally. You will never know that the computer’s drive was ever wiped, it looks like how you left it.

Caveat whatnot: I’m not going to say that iDefrag killed my iBook’s hard drive, but the effort of defragging it appears to have pushed it over the edge into click-of-deathsville, and into the waiting arms of the AppleCare techs. (Yes, I backed up first, thankfully.)

This method works by copying your entire drive, system and all, to a blank drive, say an external drive or a server, formatting the first disk, then copying everything back.

In doing this, all files will be written contiguously on the first copy.

The pros (Again, from what i know) are that it is simple, requires no third party software, and can be quicker.

The cons are that it does not prioritize data or files based on rules (Like iDefrag), which means files are written in a dumb way.
iDefrag will make sure all system files are written first, in the faster section of the drive, and then files and applications you use the most, etc. based on pre-coded rules, that are customizable, though not easily. It also requires hardware, mainly another drive big enough for the contents of the first, and an enclosure.

Personally, i wish i could use an external drive as a “scratch” drive for iDefrag, thereby getting the speed of 2 drives, and the smart defragging of my disk.

As for restoring from a non-system backup (certain files or folders only), it depends what program, but data will be written into available space on the disk. Restoring from a full system backup will be essentially the “Hucky” method explained above, provided that the drive is formatted.

Hope this helps

Again, hope this post clears some things up.

A hard drive saves data in the file zone, and then makes an entry into the Directory, a special place on your drive dedicated to refrences to files. The Directory is like a map of YourDrivesVille. It shows you where things are, and how to get there. But to get the file, the drive head still has to go wherever the map tells it to.

Diskwarrior takes your directory data, not the files themselves, and defrags it, as well as optimizing it by placing the most used portions of the directory where it can be accessed the quickest. In addition, it corrects any Directory errors or missing / corrupt files as it goes.

This is like taking the current map, and checking it for accuracy and discrepancies, and noting what could be better. It will (hypothetically) make the most used files in bold print for easy access, and make sure there is no dead space in the map.

This app is a life saver when apps are quitting on launch (likely because it cannot find a file due to incomplete / bad directory data.), and/or certain folders make the Finder crash, or files cannot be found.

iDefrag actually rips everything in YourDrivesVille out of the ground, and rearranges it according to various rules. It will try to place the most used files in the easiest places to reach, and try to have all files in one piece, not scattered across the map, which would make the drive head play scavenger hunt with your data.

After all of this, iDefrag creates a new directory with all the changes.

iDefrag is most useful when your computer is “chugging”, slower, or you recently finished a big audiovisual project.

In recap, Diskwarrior is a good first response to suspected file problems, and great for speeding things up a bit. As it only works with the Directory, your files are still fragmented, but the index is not.

iDefrag should NOT be run if you suspect any sort of OS problems, file problems, or disk problems. iDefrag uses a variety of safeguards against data loss and errors, but any one of those problems increases astronomically the probability of failure.

I have, and use, both. They have helped tremendously, and I am grateful that they exist.

Hope this post clears some things up.

Upon booting you can launch iDefrag and perform a Full Defrag. It takes a while but the performance gain are worth it. Since I was running on a laptop I could safely check the checkbox in preferences that says ‘overlap writes’ since even a power failure would not turn off the harddrive.

About ‘You Don’t Need To Defrag On Mac OS X’: WRONG. Mac OS does indeed some kind of defrag in the background. The way it’s done is that everytime a file is opened, Mac OS will check if it has 8 fragments or more and uses less than 20 MB. In that case it will defragment the file and move it on the drive. However in my case, it seems that I no longer had enough free contiguous space for that operation to succeed, so system.log kept repeating this line over and over:
hfs_relocate: didn’t move into metadata zone
Although no performance hit were experienced, it was extremely irritating since that useless log what preventing the HD to sleep (I leave my laptop on 24/24). No thanks to apple for warning the user about anything at all, and no thanks for not even putting this warning or the whole auto-defrag mecanism as a user-preference..