Defragmenting OS X
I love Macs, and people around me will find the occasional evangelistic aura oozing from my pores. However, unlike evangelists Mac Fanboys who do not recognise flaws in their beliefs are annoying as fuck, I recognise flaws to the OS X, with high memory usage (thus reducing available physical memory) being one of its drawbacks, amongst others. One of the supposed advantages of OS X is the much (one-sided) discussed efficiency of the entire system's design, thus negating the need to defrag the system. This view that Apple goes along with.
In a typical Apple-isque communication, one can basically sum it up as 'the problem is there, we don't recommend you fixing it but if you want to, go ahead and sort it out yourself, its not our problem'.
With my MacBook (late 2008 Aluminium Unibody, 2.0GHz) maxxed out (7,200rpm HDD and RAM at the officially supported 4.0GB), I was satisfied but was always picking up interesting articles which could potentially enhance my computing experience.***
During one of my usual tech-blog crawling sessions, I stumbled upon a Lifehacker discussing various defragmenting utilities for Windows, with a number of comments beating an already dead-horse on Mac defragging when someone mentioned iDefrag.
iDefrag is thus far the only Mac defrag utility that I know of, and offers several defragmentation algorthms such as compact, metadata, optimise, quick defrag (online) and full-defrag.
While I won't go into all the different algorhythms, one mention worthy method which allows you to imagine its effect would be 'compact', where it shifts all files to the beginning of the volume, freeing up space. This is possibly due to files occupying half-blocks similar to FAT32 structures. I'm not a programmer or an expert in storage so I'll just leave this as it is to use your imagination to further expand on such concepts.
The problem with running most defragmentation programs is that your main disk would be mounted / online, reducing the ability of the defrag tool to defrag certain system files in use. The only defrag-algorhythm available to online users would be quick-defrag, which didn't provide much gains on personal observation.
Certain Windows utilities like O&O Defrag permits offline defragmentation, but the problem with iDefrag was that there was no user-friendly method to initiate offline defragmentation, so I had to resort to installing a fresh copy of OS X on a portable USB disk and booting to it. This kept my main disk unmounted and open to defragmenting access, and allowed me to run a full-defrag.
*** After defragmenting my computer, there was a slight but noticeable increase in performance. General things that cannot be reliably measured like the time it takes to load certain programs3 were noticeably smoother. Unfortunately, in the excitement and anticipation of testing the application, I forgot to do pre-defrag tests. I am seriously a fail-blogger.
Fortunately, I found a friend who was willing to let me have a go at her computer (early 2009 MacBook 2.0GHz, 120GB Hitachi with 2GB RAM).
Pre-defragmentation. Not much you can see from the main window as it is zoomed up far too much, but do note the lower bar which indicates fragmentation. Boot up time (easiest metric to measure reliably) was about 1 minute 4 seconds.
Post defragmentation. Fragmentation is low, with only 11 files left fragmented. For some reason they could not be further defragmented, but trying to defrag those files would be just chasing marginal gains. Boot up time reduced to 54 seconds.
She later reported that her computer is now very fast, and that I am very sai lei.
***
A round up of iDefrag's pros and cons.
Pros
1. Improved load times.
2. It has a very fun GUI that shows the copy and write process, similar to Windows 984. A simply and yet surprisingly and annoyingly addictive process to watch.
Cons:
1. It costs £19.95. That's a shit load of money there.
2. No user-friendly way to run a full defrag.
3. Quick defrag (only option available to general users) does not provide noticeable results.
Notes:
1. Bad Apple, going back on your words.
2. Backing up and restoring your entire hard disk probably allows the system to rewrite all files in a structured manner, permitting better file contiguity.
3. Being a student, the 3 most frequently used programs would be Excel, PowerPoint and Word from the Office Suite. These programs take excruciatingly long times to load, but has since improved noticeably.
4. Windows 98 Defragmentation Video
"You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X. Here's why: [redacted]
...
For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.
...
If you think you might need to defragment
Try restarting first. It might help, and it's easy to do.
... there's a chance the disks could be fragmented1. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities.
Another option is to back up your important files, erase the hard disk, then reinstall Mac OS X and your backed up files2."
In a typical Apple-isque communication, one can basically sum it up as 'the problem is there, we don't recommend you fixing it but if you want to, go ahead and sort it out yourself, its not our problem'.
With my MacBook (late 2008 Aluminium Unibody, 2.0GHz) maxxed out (7,200rpm HDD and RAM at the officially supported 4.0GB), I was satisfied but was always picking up interesting articles which could potentially enhance my computing experience.
During one of my usual tech-blog crawling sessions, I stumbled upon a Lifehacker discussing various defragmenting utilities for Windows, with a number of comments beating an already dead-horse on Mac defragging when someone mentioned iDefrag.
iDefrag is thus far the only Mac defrag utility that I know of, and offers several defragmentation algorthms such as compact, metadata, optimise, quick defrag (online) and full-defrag.
While I won't go into all the different algorhythms, one mention worthy method which allows you to imagine its effect would be 'compact', where it shifts all files to the beginning of the volume, freeing up space. This is possibly due to files occupying half-blocks similar to FAT32 structures. I'm not a programmer or an expert in storage so I'll just leave this as it is to use your imagination to further expand on such concepts.
The problem with running most defragmentation programs is that your main disk would be mounted / online, reducing the ability of the defrag tool to defrag certain system files in use. The only defrag-algorhythm available to online users would be quick-defrag, which didn't provide much gains on personal observation.
Certain Windows utilities like O&O Defrag permits offline defragmentation, but the problem with iDefrag was that there was no user-friendly method to initiate offline defragmentation, so I had to resort to installing a fresh copy of OS X on a portable USB disk and booting to it. This kept my main disk unmounted and open to defragmenting access, and allowed me to run a full-defrag.
Fortunately, I found a friend who was willing to let me have a go at her computer (early 2009 MacBook 2.0GHz, 120GB Hitachi with 2GB RAM).
Pre-defragmentation. Not much you can see from the main window as it is zoomed up far too much, but do note the lower bar which indicates fragmentation. Boot up time (easiest metric to measure reliably) was about 1 minute 4 seconds.
Post defragmentation. Fragmentation is low, with only 11 files left fragmented. For some reason they could not be further defragmented, but trying to defrag those files would be just chasing marginal gains. Boot up time reduced to 54 seconds.
She later reported that her computer is now very fast, and that I am very sai lei.
A round up of iDefrag's pros and cons.
Pros
1. Improved load times.
2. It has a very fun GUI that shows the copy and write process, similar to Windows 984. A simply and yet surprisingly and annoyingly addictive process to watch.
Cons:
1. It costs £19.95. That's a shit load of money there.
2. No user-friendly way to run a full defrag.
3. Quick defrag (only option available to general users) does not provide noticeable results.
Notes:
1. Bad Apple, going back on your words.
2. Backing up and restoring your entire hard disk probably allows the system to rewrite all files in a structured manner, permitting better file contiguity.
3. Being a student, the 3 most frequently used programs would be Excel, PowerPoint and Word from the Office Suite. These programs take excruciatingly long times to load, but has since improved noticeably.
4. Windows 98 Defragmentation Video
posted by 陳一豪 at
12:15 AM
1 Comments
