Disk defragmenter for Mac - Do I really need it?

[stevenros]

My friend is a PC user and very often I see him defragmenting his hard drive. When I questioned him, he replied that it increases his system's speed.

I also planned to defrag my Mac. But there was no such inbuilt application to defrag Mac. So I used Stellar Drive defrag . Although my Mac HDD (Mac OSX 10.6) defragmntation is complete but didn't see any remarkable increase in performance.


Should I try another application or its just a wastage of time?

[Salmon Trout]

Defragmentation is something that many people think is a magic speedup spell, but it sounds like you are wise enough to doubt this. If a disk is very badly fragmented, then it can slow a system down quite a lot, and defragging can bring it back to normal (as long as the disk is not too full) but if the state of fragmentation is not too bad, then as you have noticed, not much difference (if any) will be seen. Also you don't need to do it very often.

[Linux711]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375

[Salmon Trout]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375

Just about all of those "Do I need to optimize?" bullet points [summary: "No"] apply equally well to the other modern operating systems running on modern hardware.

[Linux711]

I forgot to mention that if you are using a SSD (Solid State Drive), then you never need to defrag no matter what the operating system is. If you ever plan on upgrading you should get one. The price for capacity isn't very good yet. In a year or two. . .

[stevenros]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375

Thanks for the link dear.

I think I didn't find any noticeable change because size of my data was too small. But defragmentation could be a helping hand if:
1. You have large sized files
2. Your hard drive is almost full
3. You frequently modify large files


What is your opinion?

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

I forgot to mention that if you are using a SSD (Solid State Drive), then you never need to defrag no matter what the operating system is. If you ever plan on upgrading you should get one. The price for capacity isn't very good yet. In a year or two. . .

You just have to watch out for TRIM

[stevenros]

Defragmentation is something that many people think is a magic speedup spell, but it sounds like you are wise enough to doubt this. If a disk is very badly fragmented, then it can slow a system down quite a lot, and defragging can bring it back to normal (as long as the disk is not too full) but if the state of fragmentation is not too bad, then as you have noticed, not much difference (if any) will be seen. Also you don't need to do it very often.

As there was no inbuilt Mac program to defrag Mac so I used a third party tool. The status of my disk was really very bad and it was fragmented very badly.

After defragmenting the entire disk , my Mac performance raised by 8%. So, I think , it was an intelligent investment. 

[BC_Programmer]

The status of my disk was really very bad and it was fragmented very badly.

Very doubtful, given the way most modern filesystems work. I've never run disk defragmentor on this machine and it still shows it as 0% fragmented. Also, for all we know the piece of software you found is a scam that pretends your filesystem is fragmented badly.

After defragmenting the entire disk , my Mac performance raised by 8%. So, I think , it was an intelligent investment.

Where did this 8% figure come from?