On 10/26/03 3:01 PM C. A. Niemiec wrote: >>>I don't recall where, but it seems to me that 20% of raw drive space (per >>>partition) is a number I read somewhere. Mind, with the (comparatively) >>>immense drives we have these days, that seems like a lot.
>> >>Yeah, that doesn't really make sense. If you have an Xserve RAID, are >>you going to throw away a fifth of your rack space for virtual memory? >>Hell no. I think somebody made that guideline up out of thin air. >I'm sure sometime in the past few months I saw a snippet that HFS+ >formatted drives risk serious directory errors when at over 85% >capacity... maybe at MacFixIt? 15% is still a lot - too much in my opinion. The 15-20% (some advise even more) is not wasted space. It's used not only for virtual memory, but also for all kinds of temporary files. If you have less, your computer will experience serious slow-downs. With a super-large drive, I suppose the percentage could be less. I've assumed that this slack is necessary only on the main hard drive, but I could be wrong. > >I've never gotten a complete answer on the value of defragmenting under >OS X either. Like the question of whether to keep your computer on all the time, opinions are sharply divided. Apparently the Unix underpinning of OS X does a fair job of avoiding disk fragmentation. Also, I have heard horror tales about loss of data after defragmentation, especially with Norton, so I have chosen not to defragment. Len -- Leonard Morgenstern [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Do as I say, not as I do." That's not hypocricy, it's good advice.
