On Apr 21, 2009, at 11:26 AM, Wallace Adrian D'Alessio wrote:

> On another forum I have seen opinions that defragging of OS X hard  
> drives is
> both unnecessary and even harmful?

OS X already minimizes fragmentation as a normal part of the OS, and  
frankly, there's been little advantage to defragging any system since  
the days when hard drives were measured in megabytes.

Defragging can be harmful because you're futzing around with the whole  
disk...something screws up and your system can be rendered unbootable  
or worse.

Generally speaking, the ONLY times actually defragging is valuable  
these days is when you have lots of file additions and deletions near  
the capacity of the drive. About the only time that happens these days  
is when you're doing things like editing video or doing FX for video,  
etc.

Much simpler there to use a scratch disk to hold all the project files  
and reformat the scratch disk between projects.

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs



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