Defrag Questions

I understand that there is little need to defragment a mac. Is that true?

Now what about defragging Vista (running via parallels)?


Thanks.

 

mac, no none at all. vista, yes- just as if running on a standard pc.

 

There may be a slight need to defrag with third party utilities if you're constantly working with files over 20mb. Generally, though, OS X takes care of everything for you, even past its 20mb "limit".

 

Isn't the limit only 10MB?

In any case, while the theory is that OSX does not require defragging, if you use large files and move/change/delete/read/write to them a lot, you may need to defrag (of course, some people suggest that the current defrag options for OSX actually slow performance too, but that's hard to tell).

As for Vista - yes you'll need to defrag it. Vista itself comes with a built-in defrag program (some old old old version of Diskeeper) that sucks, but will be slightly updated in SP1 (only interface-wise, and not in terms of functionality). Still, it should be sufficient for most users.

There are a number of good 3rd party commercial software for dragging Windows - Diskeeper Pro Premier, PerfectDisk, Auslogics, and O&O...(listed in order of my preference )...

For OSX, theres iDefrag, which is having some problems with Leopard compatibility currently (although a workaround has been made...sort of). I think some of the comprehensive tool suites offer built-in defrag options as well.

EDIT: just read your post again.
As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that Diskeeper runs while I'm opening Windows in a virtual window (I'm using VMWare). In fact, I'm sure it doesn't because it recognizes the change in hardware and the registration doesn't match, so it temporarily is disabled then. You can activate it manually to run in the virtual setting though, and then reactivate it again when you're in Boot Camp if you really want.

 

I use iDefrag every now and again, and it does find stuff to defrag and move around. Although I don't think it really helps, or moves around a lot of data.

You should be fine without it (in osx that is, not windows)

 

I constantly work with files that are over 700MB - 7GB and moving DVD images around. When I hear iDefrag has issues worked out, maybe I'll give that a try.

 

The defrag options for OSX are really limited. The main problem with idefrag that I'm finding now (other than lack of clear empirical proof that it actually helps performance that is), is how slow it is. They mentioned that the new workaround they had will slow performance under Leopard, but it took over 3 hours to defrag 500GB 25% (granted the drive was full of 200-300mb files, but still)...at which point I had to access the drive and stopped the defrag.

Another interesting caveat of iDefrag is that you can't defrag your system drive. Windows defraggers solve this problem by defragging what it can, and then letting you do boot-time defrags of system files, pagefiles, the mft, etc. iDefrag actually makes you burn a boot-up disk or boot from a different volume (how many people have a spare boot drive hanging around as a backup? ). To be fair, this may be more a limitation of how OSX starts up than iDefrag itself though.

 

The best option to defrag if you REALLY need to is still using SuperDuper to make a back up of your system files, then wiping your hard drive clean and installing your SuperDuper file back into the system.

At least, that's what I've heard. I'd forgotten all about it until now. If you do a search for SuperDuper you should find stuff on the forum about it.