On Saturday, June 4, 2005, at 09:44 AM, Yersinia wrote:
Mike writes,
<Everytime I install a program or update I see a message of "Optimizing
Volume..."
What exactly is it doing?>
I've never had any of my Macs do this spontaneously and don't know why
yours is doing it -- I have to actively optimize.
In any case, when your computer stores stuff, it's not necessarily to
the
same exact location on the hard drive every time, even when saving the
"updated" version of a file -- as one example: updating your resume and
save over the old one. Over time you get "fragments" where pieces of
particular apps or files are...for lack of a better description,
"elsewhere from the original location" on the drive. I believe the
"resource forks" are what enable the Mac to still piece it all together
so you can open it anyway, but this fragmentation can slow the opening
of
an application or file (sometimes perceptively, oftentimes not, though,
depends how fragmented your HDD is).
Optimizing puts everything back together and therefore "defragments"
the
drive, increasing performance and efficiency. While I've never seen or
heard of a Mac optimizing automatically upon installing an application
or
update, perhaps yours is "inserting" the app/update onto your drive in
such a way as to prevent the kind of fragmentation I mentioned --
that's
my guess anyway. Me, personally, I like to optimize once a week.
~Yersinia.
I noticed the same thing recently. But the "optimizing" only took a
few seconds, so I doubt it was really defragging my 80 GB partition(?)
Not that it doesn't need it. Without having figured out a good backup
method though, I'm reluctant to do it. Also haven't gotten DiskWarrior
yet. I'll get to it one of these years. ;D
- Peter
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