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Disk Defragmenting

It's not really necessary...OS X defrags small files on its own on the fly.

You'll find a few people on here who think it's a good idea to do it once in a while under certain circumstances. I'm not one of them, so I'll leave any specific recommendations to them. :D
 
I have never defragged my Macs.. ever. It's totally unnecessary and if it were I'm sure Apple would provide a utility to do it like MS does.
 
JurgenWigg said:
Is there a disk defragmenter in Mac OS or does it somehow use disks more efficiently than XP?
Click to expand...
What do you think this is? Windows 95? Or eh... 98? or eh... ME... XP? :D Haha! I laugh at routine maintenance.
 
Yah, Disk Permissions seem only necessary after OS updates which is when I run it just for grins and giggles. Of course, I was a big defrag hound when running Windows, but I've adapted to OS X very well :)
 
Repairing permissions will occasionally help out during troubleshooting, but not very often. Ask madjew, he can probably give you a count of how many times its actually helped people out around here. But doing it as routine maintenance? Like I said, if it makes you feel better, go for it, but its really unnecessary.
 
A simple and effective routine maintenance you can do with the terminal...

type:

sudo periodic daily

wait for it to finish...

sudo periodic weekly

wait for it to finish...

sudo periodic monthly

wait for it to finish...

This will run scripts that help clean out caches, logs and other things that can bog down OS X.
 
OSX does defrag on the fly, but only for smaller files (sub 20MB or 25MB, I forget which). To be honest, this is fine for most users but people with smaller hard drives working with larger files might benefit from a third party defrag app. However, since storage is so cheap, this shouldn't be an issue for most people.

Repairing permissions is something to do if you're bored or if the machine is acting slightly quirky. In many cases it works, in many cases it has no effect. It's easy to do though, so should be considered a good first step.

Periodical scripts are also of little importance to most users. Once again, I wouldn't bother running them unless something was acting quirky. Of note, these periodicals run automatically, very early in the morning. If the computer is shut down, they will not run. If the machine is asleep and running Tiger, they'll run next time the machine is awoken. :)
 
After first running the periodic scripts on my G4 mini (with Tiger) awhile back, it booted about twice as fast. While the blue progress bar would just saunter across before the cleanup (probably about 10-15 seconds), it rarely has time to reach the other side of the window (3-6 seconds). Long story short, I run them every couple of weeks or so now, as my machine is rarely on and idle at 3am. Only takes a second to get them started, and you can leave Terminal in the background while it works anyway. Also, to get them to run all in sequence (to avoid waiting and typing three times), just su to root and then type them with semicolons in between: "periodic daily;periodic weekly;periodic monthly". Then you can check your email or whatever as it does it's thing.
 
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