Hardrive defrag on MB

[rockinrocker]

Greetings,

So I just got all my apps and files transfered to my new hdd, and I'm wondering about defragging.

Is that gonna be helpful, necessary or is that just a windows/NTFS things?
If so, how would I go about doing that? I don't see anything like defragging in the disc utility....


Thanks.

 

[72930]

Some Macs can benefit quite a bit from defragmenting their hard drive. But not for the reason that you might expect. There is often little performance to be gained by defragmenting your hard drive, but it can stave off some very flaky behavior, out of memory errors, and possibly even data loss.

 

[~Shard~]

Unless things have changed, you do not need to defragment your Mac HDD as the OS does it for you. I believe this is a standard feature in Tiger (I still defrag every once and a while on my Panther Mac...)

Also, slightly off-topic but since I recently posted this elsewhere, here are some tips to help clean up your HDD if you're interested:

- use OmniDiskSweeper (not free) or my personal favorite WhatSize (free) to determine what all is taking up room on your HDD and where it is
- remove GarageBand and iDVD if you do not need them - that should free up around 6 GB right there
- check out /Library/Printers/ - 2 GB of printer drivers that you may or may not need
- use Monolingual to remove the unnecessary language resources from your Mac*. Another option is to use Delocalizer
- lastly, you could always use AppZapper (not free) or uApp (free) to ensure that when you uninstall any programs that all those pesky sub-folders, etc. are deleted

That should just about do it.

* a note about Monolingual. If you are not careful this can seriously screw up your Mac if it is Intel-based. Basically, leave the Architectures settings alone. If you delete G3, G4, G5 then anything which is PPC-based which will try to run under Rosetta, won't. Otherwise, Monolingual is great.

 

[scott85213]

Take a look at this.

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/showthread.php?t=32660

 

[OwlsAndApples]

Take a look at this.

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/showthread.php?t=32660

Thanks for that, some good info there

 

[Wolfpup]

It does do some defraging automatically, though to be perfectly honest I get the impression NTFS is more robust than HFS+.