It's a myth that OS X can do proper defragging all by itself. It does defrag to a certain extent, but never all the way, nor does it do it particularly well. It couldn't, at least not in the background.
Even from the article one gets the impression that defragging is only necessary when the HD is almost full, which is simply not true.
However, it is true, with a properly maintained setup, which uses a system partition separate from partitions used for large video and audio files, it is probably unnecessary to defragment the system partition very often. It won't hurt if done properly.
There recently was a very long discussion in the osxaudio forums on this subject with some very competent people discussing the subject at length.
Johannes
Simon Troup wrote:
It is nonsense to believe Apple one minute that OS X eliminates all needs for defragmentation. It is true to a certain extend that MacOS X has better built-in file maintenance than OS 9, and it does some rudimentary defragmentation. For many people this will be just fine.
It's not nonsense - they haven't claimed any such thing. I think it's summed up very well in the knowledgebase article, they don't make out that they have cured defragmentation completely, and mention problems that can occur when you are writing really large files or are approaching disk capacity.
There are however, as I'm sure you're aware, many people who are routinely (and needlessly) defragmenting their OSX drives.
I would suggest that unless people fit into one of the special categories (as you clearly do, granted!) they are very unlikely to suffer from the kind of problems they had with OS9 and earlier - in fact, routine defragmentation is asking for trouble.
Simon Troup
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