"Defragmentation In MacBook Pro

Hi. I am a recent Macbook Pro 13 " 2011 purchaser. Is there a Mac program that does a defragmentation of the Mac Files as the Windows PC has the Defragmentation in File Cleanup? Thank you for your help.

 

Not important in Mac OS X. The operating system takes care of file management and hard drive management automatically.

About disk optimization with Mac OS X

 

Thank you very much for that link. It was extremely helpful. I was a PC user from 1984 to present. I'm a new Mac User and wasn't sure of how defragmentation worked in the Macs.

 

No problem. I'm a little bothered that it's 2011 and disk defragmenter is still a windows 7 utility. I don't see why it's necessary to involve the user in managing the fragmentation on the disk. The OS should just do it, in my opinion.

edit: to be fair, maybe windows 7 automatically does disk defragmenting when idle? I don't know.

 

By default in Windows 7, defrag is scheduled automatically for the user. You can still run manually, but there is a schedule as well.

 

Well, that was the case in XP as well, but I think what he meant was automatic defragmentation in the background.

 

I do not think it runs in the background. It runs off peak hours or after x time idle.

 

While Mac OS generally defragments itself (due to the journaling file system), it will only defragment files 20MB and below in size. The journaling file system (HFS+) can get fragmented, depending on what you're doing.

As a regular user, you shouldn't experience too many fragmentation issues. If you're a power user (like me) and use VMs, download a lot of files, have a lot of Steam games, work with video, etc, then you would need to find some way of defragmenting your drive.

From the link above: "If your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files (such as editing video, but see the Tip below if you use iMovie and Mac OS X 10.3), there's a chance the disks could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities." (Note the language here, trying to understate things a bit.)

A few links on fragmentation and journaling in Mac OS:
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting

http://www.osxbook.com/software/hfsdebug/fragmentation.html: "When a file is opened on an HFS+ volume, the following conditions are tested:

If the file is less than 20 MB in size
If the file is not already busy
If the file is not read-only
If the file has more than eight extents
If the system has been up for at least three minutes
If all of the above conditions are satisfied, the file is relocated -- it is defragmented on-the-fly."


So, bottom line, for the most part you should be ok. Keep at least 10-15% of your drive free and don't mess around with large files often. If you do need to defrag, check out DiskWarrior or iDefrag (I use iDefrag myself and have been pleased with its results).

 

Be aware, if you have a ssd, turn off defrag.

 

As mentioned, dont' defrag with SSD, and OSX only auto-defrags under limited conditions and very small files. On the Windows side, there is no auto-defrag in the sense of automatic background defrags without scheduling--historically, Windows used a limited version of Diskeeper, and the major incentive to upgrade to the commercial version was that background defrag feature. That hasn't changed even now as far as I know. (Incidentally, Diskeeper also boasts of a technology that helps SSD performance--I'd take that with a grain of salt).

If you need to separately defrag in OSX, iDefrag mentioned above is decent. I haven't been using it of late since I moved to SSD, but the last versions were completely manual, and any defrag of system data required a separate boot drive (which it'll help you create, but is still extremely inconvenient).

There's also quite some debate between the Diskeeper and PerfectDisk fans about the various defrag algorithms and the benefits of freespace defrag. That debate largely doesn't apply to OSX because...well, most people probably don't care.... and you don't really have a meaningful choice along those lines in OSX anyway

So in sum, get a decent modern SSD and forget about defragging forever.

 

Thank you everyone for your valuable information. I don't think I will need to defrag anytime soon. I have a 750 GB Hard drive and I have 720 Gigs free!

 

I've got a 160GB SSD along with a 500GB HDD in my MacBook Pro. The SSD I don't have to worry about defragging, but I do defrag my 500GB storage drive every so often.

 

Yes, thumbs up with SSD in Macs. The startup is lightning quick and I think I just got a beach ball today with multiple tabs, but starting up chrome was a flash again.