On Apr 21, 2009, at 2:06 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote: > 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.
My only long term usage Windows computer, a 350MHz P2 PC, has a 40GB HD that was 90% full and almost completely fragmented (90%+ fragmented files, and super slow). Without thinking, I started the Defragment Utility and it took forever to complete, several hours. I found two or three large files to delete, bumping the free space up to 28% now. I reran the Defragment utility, and to my surprise the HD was still mostly fragmented. After completing a 2nd time, I looked again, and it was STILL mostly fragmented. I've now run the Defragment utility about 8 times in a row, and the HD is STILL about 50% fragmented. Each cycle is only gaining me a single digit increase in the percentage fragmentation. I've never defragmented my Mac, and I've never owned a Mac as slow as my completely fragmented PC, which is nearly unusable. Its main usage is to boot DOS or Windows to run firmware update programs for hardware that requires a PC to update the firmware. I think Bruce is right, Macs don't seem to benefit much from defragmenting. I don't have enough experience with Windows to know, but so far my experience is typical Windows frustration with 24 hours of defragmentation still ongoing. We'll see... I'm not holding my breath. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
