TidBITS#686/30-Jun-03
=====================
Before you spend hours optimizing your Mac's hard disk, read David
Shayer's article on why it's a waste of time. Also this week, Adam
wraps up MacHack coverage with anecdotes about the conference's
people, events, and fashions. Lastly, we note the winners of this
year's Apple Design Awards, clarify some Mac OS X adoption
numbers, pass on Extensis's acquisition of DiamondSoft and the
demise of Casady & Greene, and call for German translators.
Topics:
MailBITS/30-Jun-03
MacHack 2003 Vignettes
Optimizing Disks Is a Waste of Time
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/30-Jun-03
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-686.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2003/TidBITS#686_30-Jun-03.etx>
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MailBITS/30-Jun-03
------------------
**Casady & Greene Shuts Down** -- Casady & Greene, one of the
oldest companies in the Macintosh market, is shutting down after
19 years, according to Bonnie Mitchell, Casady & Greene's VP of
Public Relations. Full details weren't available at press time,
but it appears as though Casady & Greene simply couldn't remain
financially viable. Although the company had released a number of
Mac OS X products this year, including Spell Catcher X, Tri-
Catalog, Clone X, and iData Pro (see "The Digital Shoebox: iData
Pro X 1.0.5 in TidBITS-675_), revenues weren't sufficient to keep
the doors open or to pay some of its contract programmers. None of
Casady & Greene's current products have the same broad appeal as
Conflict Catcher (which never made it to Mac OS X) or SoundJam,
which became the basis for Apple's iTunes, and the transition to
Mac OS X proved particularly problematic for the company. [ACE]
<http://www.casadyg.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07145>
**Extensis Buys DiamondSoft** -- Just a few days after Apple
revealed that Mac OS X 10.3 Panther would feature a font-
management utility called Font Book, Extensis (makers of Suitcase)
announced that it was buying DiamondSoft (makers of Font Reserve).
Coincidence? Yes, actually, since corporate acquisitions take more
than a few days to arrange. Nicole Andergard of Extensis confirmed
that the acquisition had been in the works for some time, and the
announcement of Font Book had come as a surprise to both
companies. She also said the point behind the acquisition was
eventually to combine Suitcase's strengths on the client side
with Font Reserve's server-side capabilities to create the most
powerful font-management solution for publishing professionals.
Also, although Apple hasn't provided many details about Font Book,
Nicole said they had been led to believe that it was more of an
entry-level font-management program that would be unlikely to
cannibalize professional users from Suitcase. [ACE]
<http://www.extensis.com/press/releases/063003_fr.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06751>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06797>
**Remember? Not Forgotten** -- Dave Warker's Remember?, a superbly
simple calendar and reminder application that got its start as a
desk accessory, has at last migrated to Mac OS X with version 4.
Although Remember? doesn't show banners in its calendar for
multi-day events, its superb and original interface and flexible
reminders make it a welcome alternative to iCal, and at $20
shareware, it's a bargain. [MAN]
<http://www.warker.com/remember.html>
**Another Take on Jaguar Upgrade Percentages** -- Last week,
I commented that I'd heard from a developer at MacHack that a
non-trivial percentage of Mac OS X users had not upgraded from
Mac OS X 10.1 to Jaguar, a fact I found surprising. It turns out
I had reason to be surprised - it had simply been reported to me
incorrectly (as the developer said, it's never safe to believe
anything that's said after 48 hours of sleeplessness at MacHack).
Here's the real deal. About 75 percent of this developer's users
are running Mac OS X, and only about 1 percent are still using
Mac OS X 10.1. A second developer whose software also reports
operating system version also shared his numbers, which were
almost identical, so I think it's safe to say that the number
of users running Mac OS X 10.1 is vanishingly small.
Now, these numbers come with several caveats. First, although
they're automatically collected, sending the information is
optional, so it's conceivable that people running earlier versions
of Mac OS X may not be volunteering the information as readily.
Second and more likely to skew the results, these numbers come
from people registering current software products, and that is
a behavior that likely trends with continually upgrading the
operating system. To put it another way, those who didn't pay
for the upgrade to Jaguar may also be less likely to register
shareware. [ACE]
**Apple Announces Design Awards 2003** -- Wrapping up the
Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last week, Apple announced
the winners of its annual Apple Design Awards. As with last year,
the awards recognize Mac OS X software that excel in seven
categories. Topping the list with two awards was Salling Clicker
1.5 from Salling Software, taking Best Mac OS X Product (Best of
Show) and Most Innovative Mac OS X Product. Using Bluetooth
networking, owners of select Sony-Ericsson cellular phones can
control scriptable applications such as iTunes or Keynote on
their Macs (especially cool is the capability to run "proximity
sensor" scripts that activate when the phone comes into the
Mac's Bluetooth range).
<http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/designawards.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06818>
<http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Clicker/>
In the Best Mac OS X User Experience category was Starry Night
Backyard 4.0 from Space Holdings (see "Up, Up, and Away with
Starry Night Backyard" in TidBITS-542_). The Best Mac OS X
Technology Adoption award went to World Book 2003 Jaguar Edition
from Software MacKiev. Appropriately working together on a truly
collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner,
and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best
Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text
editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared
document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used
Hydra to take notes during this year's Hack Contest.) This year's
Best Mac OS X Use of Open Source was the University of Michigan's
Fugu 1.0, a graphical front end for SFTP (Secure File Transfer).
And, in a new category this year, the Best Mac OS X Server
Solution award was accepted by BioTeam for iNquiry 1.0, software
that can be loaded onto multiple Mac OS X Server machines to
create processing clusters for analyzing biological data (see
"Bioinformatics and the Mac" in TidBITS-622_). Congratulations
to the winners, as well as the runner-up applications in each
category, which are listed at Apple's Web site. [JLC]
<http://www.starrynight.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06069>
<http://www.mackiev.com/>
<http://hydra.globalse.org/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07244>
<http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/>
<http://www.bioteam.net/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06764>
**German Translators Needed!** Our German translation team has
dwindled in size and available time, so much so that they haven't
been able to translate TidBITS for a while now. (Our Japanese,
Dutch, and French translations are still going strong; Spanish
and Russian are in need of new translation teams.) If you can
spend a little time each week helping to translate TidBITS into
German, or helping put together and distribute the finished
product (for those who are fluent German editors but aren't as
comfortable with translation), the German-speaking Macintosh
community will thank you. For more information, please contact
Heinz Gnehm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Thanks for helping out! [ACE]
MacHack 2003 Vignettes
----------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Normally after Macintosh conferences I like to draw some
conclusions about what we can learn about the overall world of the
Macintosh from the attendees, the discussions, the attendance, and
so on. After this year's MacHack, there simply wasn't much to say,
thanks to Apple rescheduling the Worldwide Developer Conference
(WWDC) for one day after MacHack ended. That meant the developers
at MacHack could merely speculate about what would be announced at
WWDC, and worse, it meant there was no Apple Feedback session and
that only a handful Apple employees came to MacHack, instead of
the usual contingent of 15 or so. (Overall attendance was down
less than 20 percent, a surprisingly strong showing given the WWDC
conflict.) Sure, almost all the hacks used Mac OS X, and it took
some looking to find anyone even still running Mac OS 9, but
that's not particularly telling any more. In the end, MacHack
this year had a bit less of a Macintosh focus, and my impression
from overheard comments was that the sessions and papers were
particularly good this year. Especially enjoyable (if not
representative) was Keith Stattenfield's reprise of last year's
"Mac OS 9 is dead!" session, in which he spoke movingly about how
much Mac OS 9 means to people still and how many people are still
using it before emphasizing that "Mac OS 9 is STILL dead!" and
launching into four or five slides of euphemisms for "dead."
In fact, the conference organizers have decided to acknowledge
the expanded scope of the conference next year, renaming it the
Advanced Developers Hands On Conference (ADHOC) and adding more
sessions on Unix, Palm, and other platforms. The hack contest will
also be changing somewhat, as the people who have run it for the
last 17 years move on to other interests. But despite the name
change and the expanded focus, I'm confident the basic experience
won't change much. That's because unlike every other industry
conference, the people organizing the sessions, papers, and other
events are themselves long-time attendees. First and foremost,
it's a conference of the developers, for the developers, and by
the developers, to paraphrase the Gettysburg Address. Look for
ADHOC next year, tentatively scheduled for July 21st through 24th,
2004, but subject to change as necessary to avoid other trade
shows.
<http://www.adhocconf.com/>
So rather than attempt to draw any far-reaching lessons, I'd like
to pass on a few vignettes of what it's like for me to be at
MacHack, along with a few behind-the scenes pictures from each.
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/686/machack-2003.html>
**Jumpsuit Week** -- Ever since he delivered the keynote at
MacHack a few years back, Andy Ihnatko has become as addicted
as I have to MacHack, and he returns every year. But last year
he missed hearing about the informal oldest t-shirt contest, so
in a fit of geek pique, he declared MacHack "Jumpsuit Week" and
appeared stylishly attired each day in a jumpsuit. He started with
a Wingz jumpsuit, an homage to the early days of the Mac when the
Wingz spreadsheet made a huge splash at Macworld Expo. The next
day was a jumpsuit worn by technicians at the Yankee Point 3
nuclear plant (bought at a salvage store and checked with a friend
to make sure it wasn't actually radioactive). And the third day
brought an authentic pre-Challenger-era Space Shuttle flight suit,
complete with NASA and shuttle patches.
<http://www.cwob.com/>
**News! Cell Phones Too Small!** Shortly after arriving at
MacHack, Greg Robbins, who works on RealOne Player at Real
Networks, and who used to live only a few miles from us in
Issaquah, Washington, couldn't find his cell phone in his bag.
Once he'd searched for a few minutes, I called it from my cell
phone, and the ringing confirmed that it was indeed in the
vicinity of his bag. Despite more searching, Greg still couldn't
find it, and a second call showed that it had in fact fallen out
of his bag and into the hotel lobby's indoor planter. Any smaller,
and we'll have to attach these silly phones to our bodies instead
of just to our belts.
<http://www.real.com/>
**When You Come to a Fork** -- As the famous saying from Yogi
Berra goes, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Yogi
obviously never thought about where forks spend much of their time
(other people's mouths), but since this was one of the few times
Geoff Canyon, who works on Runtime Revolution, and I had seen an
actual fork in an actual road, we took it. Well, its picture
anyway. And then we wondered if its proximity to MacHack might
mean that it was actually a code fork.
<http://www.inspiredlogic.com/>
<http://www.runrev.com/>
**Late Night Quips** -- Following Scott Knaster's second keynote,
filled with numerous stories from Apple and General Magic I'd
never heard before, a number of people took over one of the
conference rooms for an informal port and scotch tasting. (Note to
self: Don't assume you can buy decent port within driving distance
of the hotel in Dearborn, Michigan.) Chris Page, who works on Palm
Desktop for the Mac, brought some snacks as well. His Almond
Tartlets generated a few risque jokes (keep in mind that it's
about 3 AM at this point), so when Chris pulled the next item
from the bag, he said dryly, "And here we have a box of double
entendres." I don't think anyone actually inhaled their drink, but
a few people came pretty close while laughing themselves silly.
<http://www.chris-page.org/>
<http://www.palm.com/us/software/desktop/mac.html>
**The Family that Hacks Together...** Default Folder author Jon
Gotow and his 15-year-old son Ben were nearly inseparable for
much of MacHack as they were working on their winning hack,
Unstoppable Progress (see "The MacHax Best Hack Contest 2003"
in TidBITS-685_). At MacHack, technology is not only highly
social, it even makes teenagers want to hang out with their
parents. Well, some teenagers anyway, although I have to say,
the students I've met at MacHack over the years have seemed
far more well adjusted than the norm.
<http://www.stclairsoftware.com/DefaultFolderX/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07244>
**MacHack Food** -- After years of attending MacHack, I finally
came up with a great way of dealing with the wacky eating schedule
and programmer junk food that permeates the conference. On my way
to the airport, I stopped at a grocery store and bought eight
excellent Braeburn apples. That way, I was able to eat an apple
every day for "breakfast" before the hotel-catered "lunch" that
usually ends up being the first meal of the day otherwise. I don't
know about you, but I can't quite face a full-fledged hot lunch
after waking up, but the apple fooled my stomach into thinking
it had moved on to the second meal of the day. Then, after a bunch
of snack food and rectangular pizza at midnight, a second apple
offered a great way to consume some healthy food. Evidence I
was onto something? Every time I pulled an apple out of my bag,
a different person looked longingly at it and asked where I'd
gotten it. This may be a hint that we're all getting older.
Actually, the food was a step up from standard hotel fare this
year, since the conference organizers convinced the hotel chefs
that MacHack attendees were adventurous eaters. The first lunch
had a Mexican theme, and while it may not have been haute cuisine
(or authentic Mexican), it was a darn sight better than the
"please, not again!" rice pilaf with your choice of chicken or
salmon. The second lunch danced around a Russian or at least
Northern European theme, and again, while not exactly what I
would have chosen to eat an hour after waking up, at least it
wasn't dull.
One of the chefs even got into the swing of things, carving an
apple into a watermelon fruit salad bowl and helping bake a cookie
that looked like the Spinning Pizza of Death. Maurita Plouff, who
collaborated on the cookie, was soliciting experts to help the
chef put together a multimedia business card to use in applying
to chef competitions.
**File Sharing Still Annoying** -- Amazingly, despite all the
advances of the past decade, moving a file from one computer
to another still proved to be more difficult than it should be.
The internal MacHack network was plagued by what may have been
a bad switch, and as a result, Rendezvous, as helpful as it is
for displaying TCP/IP network resources, didn't always show
shared computers. And then there were the user mistakes - people
who hadn't turned on file sharing, or who, for some reason, had
incorrect permissions on their Drop Box folders, or other
problems. In some cases, switching to a Computer to Computer
Network (Apple's name for ad hoc networking, appropriately enough
for the future name of this conference) solved the problem. The
moral of the story is that even though file sharing is getting
better all the time, there's still room for improvement.
**Smash Hulk** -- Lastly, we all went to see The Hulk movie after
the awards banquet and, wow, was that a bad movie. Not even a good
bad movie, where you enjoy yourself but feel slightly guilty that
you haven't yet seen A Mighty Wind (Spinal Tap for folk music,
though almost nothing is as funny as Spinal Tap) or Bend It Like
Beckham (an extremely enjoyable movie about an Indian girl playing
soccer in England). No, The Hulk was just a bad movie that
irritated all the comic book fans and confused everyone else,
presumably thanks in part to the damage that was done when the
Hulk was allowed to look at the script. "Hulk smash plot. Puny
humans write stupid movie." During the traditional "Keith
Explains" group attempt to understand what had really gone on
in the movie (in which Apple's Keith Stattenfield and the rest
of us examine every little detail to extract more humor than was
actually present in the movie), there was a bit of a discussion as
to whether the best scene in The Hulk was the cameo appearance of
Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and Lou Ferrigno (who played the Hulk on
TV years ago) as security guards early in the movie, or if it was
actually the trailer for Tomb Raider II, which promises to be
a much more enjoyable bad movie.
<http://keithexplains.com/>
<http://www.thehulk.com/>
<http://amightywindonline.warnerbros.com/>
<http://www.foxsearchlight.com/bendit/>
<http://www.tombraidermovie.com/>
Optimizing Disks Is a Waste of Time
-----------------------------------
by David Shayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Optimizing disks is a waste of time. There, I said it. The horse
is out of the bag, the cat is out of the barn. So why do so many
people believe that an optimizer is an essential part of any Mac
user's tool kit? And what does it mean to optimize a disk, anyway?
**Background Fragments** -- When you save a file to disk, the file
system looks for an empty space to write the data. If there isn't
a single space large enough, it divides the file among several
smaller spaces. When a file is stored in more than one piece, we
say it's fragmented. Each piece is called a fragment, or an
extent.
A file may be broken into two fragments, or 20 fragments, or 200
fragments. The file system doesn't care; it can handle any number
of fragments equally well. However, reading a fragmented file
takes longer than reading an unfragmented one. The more fragments
in the file, the longer it takes to read. That's because the hard
disk's head must move to each fragment and read each one
separately. Reading a single chunk of data sequentially is
fast, even when the chunk is rather large. But moving the head
from track to track for each fragment is comparatively slow.
(And I mean "comparatively" - we're talking about additional
milliseconds here.)
The solution to this slowdown? Defragmenting or optimizing. Some
programs claim to defragment a disk, others claim to optimize it,
and a few offer both functions. What's the difference?
Defragmenting combines files that are broken up across multiple
fragments into a single fragment. But defragmenting files is only
part of the problem, since the free space on a disk is often split
into many pieces, a little here, and a little there. In effect,
the free space is fragmented. You may have 5 GB of free space, but
it could be in 5,000 chunks of 1 MB each. The next file saved may
be fragmented, simply because there isn't enough unfragmented free
space. That's where optimizing comes in - it defragments all the
fragmented files _and_ the free space.
Some optimizers also position similar files, such as all the
operating system files, physically next to one another. The claim
is that this speeds up the computer even more, because operating
system files are likely to be accessed together, which prevents
the disk head from needing to move long distances to read the next
file. Although the concept sounds good at first blush, I'm dubious
that this technique creates any perceptible speed increase. Beyond
a few simple cases, it's very difficult to divine in advance which
file the computer will want next.
So optimizing the disk should make your Mac run faster, right?
Well, maybe. If a file you use all the time is fragmented, such as
a key part of the operating system, then defragmenting that file
could really help. But the operating system is usually written to
the disk right after it has been freshly formatted. The disk is
empty, so the operating system is rarely fragmented. If a file you
rarely use is fragmented, such as that QuickTime movie from Aunt
Ethel's birthday party, it doesn't matter as long as you can
access the file - play the movie, in this case - normally. In
short, avoiding fragmentation is helpful only on files that are
accessed constantly.
So where did this cult of disk optimization come from? Back in the
early days of Windows, and DOS before that, PCs used the FAT (File
Allocation Table) file system. Legend has it that the FAT file
system was pretty bad about fragmenting files, so disks quickly
became badly fragmented. Back then, disks - and computers in
general - were extremely slow, especially by today's standards.
With those painfully slow disks and computers, optimizing a disk
could provide noticeable performance improvements. Modern
computers and disks are of course much faster, and they also
have much larger and more sophisticated disk caches, all of
which significantly reduces the impact of a fragmented disk.
When Apple designed the HFS (Hierarchical File System) file system
for the Mac, and later when they replaced HFS with HFS+, they took
special care to try to minimize fragmentation. All hard disks
store data in 512 byte chunks called sectors. FAT, HFS, and HFS+
use larger chunks, called clusters on FAT and allocation blocks
on HFS. One purpose of clusters and allocation blocks is to try to
reduce fragmentation, by storing files in larger pieces. But HFS
goes one step further. When saving a file to disk, the Mac file
system allocates space in even larger chunks, called clumps, in
a further effort to reduce fragmentation.
When the Mac file system saves a file, it looks for a free
space large enough to hold the entire file. If there aren't any,
it finds the largest free space available, then the next largest,
and so on, in an effort to reduce fragmentation as much as
possible. HFS will never fragment a file if it can be avoided.
**Real World Fragmentation** -- There are two things that lead
to disk fragmentation for most people: full disks and email.
Overall, the Mac's HFS+ file system does a good job of keeping
fragmentation to a minimum, assuming a reasonable amount of
free space remains on the disk to use when laying down files in
contiguous chunks. How much free space should you maintain? There
is no set answer, but leaving 20 to 25 percent of a disk free is
a good rule of thumb.
If your 60 GB hard disk has only 5 GB free, that doesn't mean that
you have a single empty space on the disk where the entire 5 GB is
available. Rather, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller
free areas. The largest single chunk of free space may be only 500
MB. When a disk is very full, not only is there less total free
space, but the size of the largest free area becomes much smaller.
Thus the likelihood of fragmentation goes way up.
What kind of files tend to be fragmented? The most likely
candidates are files that grow regularly, with little bits of
data added to them over time. Each time the file system extends
the file, it looks for another piece of free space, and the file
fragments a little more. Various types of files fit this profile,
but the prime candidate is email.
My email program's In box file has been fragmented into more than
100 pieces. Does this matter? No, it still functions perfectly.
Doesn't it slow down my email program? Certainly, but not enough
for me to notice. The main reason people optimize their disk is
to make their Mac run faster. Doubtless it does make using the Mac
somewhat faster, but I've rarely seen a perceptible speed increase
in real world usage.
**Pros and Cons** -- So increasing the speed of your Mac, even if
the improvement is nearly imperceptible, is one reason to optimize
your hard disk. There is a second reason to consider defragmenting
files. If you suffer a disk crash, disk recovery software has a
harder time recovering badly fragmented files than unfragmented
files, simply because there are more pieces to track down. And
which files are most likely to be fragmented? Email files, which
are also the most likely to have changed recently, and thus the
least likely to be in your last backup. (Obligatory reminder - if
you don't have a recent backup, make one right after you finish
reading this article. Really.)
There are also some good reasons not to optimize, and ironically,
one of them is speed. Optimizers are slow. It takes many hours to
optimize a disk. Does it make sense to tie up your Mac for hours
just to make it respond a second faster when you're opening a
mailbox?
More worrying is the fact that if the optimizer crashes, the disk
could be, to use the technical term, "horked." That's because an
optimizer must move nearly every piece of data on the disk. The
best optimizers use algorithms that make it nearly impossible to
lose data, even if the power goes out in the middle of a long
optimization, but there's always a slim chance of something bad
happening when you let a program move everything on your disk.
The problem is that no program is perfect. Earlier versions of
some optimizers have had bugs that resulted in lost data or
damaged disks. I don't know of any currently shipping optimizers
with these types of catastrophic bugs. But that's not to say that
some future version may not contain a bug, or that a current
version won't have trouble when combined with a new version of
the Mac OS. Be careful when you're using optimization software!
**Optimization Advice** -- If you're going to optimize your disk,
be sure to check the disk first with a program like Apple's Disk
First Aid or Disk Utility. A damaged disk could cause even the
best optimizer to crash when it runs across corrupted data or
data in a completely unexpected place.
It's also a good idea to back up your entire disk (or at least
your most important data) first. But once you have a backup, you
could just erase the disk, and restore from your backup. Doing
this optimizes the disk as effectively as running any optimizer.
Plus, reformatting a hard disk ensures you have clean directory
structures, and if you reformat it with the option of writing
zeroes to every sector (which takes a long time and isn't
worthwhile unless you've been experiencing odd disk problems),
you'll also make the drive map out any bad blocks it may have
developed. That's why I say my favorite optimizer is Retrospect -
with it you can both protect your data and optimize your disk.
<http://www.dantz.com/products/mac_express/>
Speed Disk, the optimizer in Symantec's Norton Utilities, has some
useful features for analyzing a disk. It rates the overall disk
fragmentation as light, moderate, or severe. It's almost certainly
not worth optimizing a disk unless the fragmentation is severe,
and often not even then. That's because Speed Disk considers a
disk severely fragmented based on a combination of how many files
are fragmented, how fragmented they are, and how fragmented the
b-trees (disk directory structures) are. The last item is what can
make it seem alarmist, because the b-trees act as triggers: if
they're fragmented a certain amount, Speed Disk can automatically
assign the whole disk a severe rating, even if the other files on
the disk wouldn't otherwise generate that rating.
<http://www.symantec.com/nu/nu_mac/>
Speed Disk shows a graph of the files and free space on the disk,
letting you see how badly the free space is fragmented. It also
lists the size of the largest free block, a useful piece of
information to keep in mind because any file larger than that
will, by necessity, be fragmented when it is saved. If you
routinely work with files larger than your largest free block,
optimizing the disk would be advisable.
Lastly, Speed Disk lists all fragmented files and the number of
fragments per file, and it lets you defragment individual files.
Why would you want to do this? HFS+ can track up to eight
fragments in a file's catalog record. If a file has more than
eight fragments, HFS+ creates additional records, called extent
records, to track the extra fragments. Since files with more than
eight fragments require accessing these additional records each
time they are opened, a file with more than eight fragments is
certainly a reasonable candidate to be defragmented, assuming of
course that you access it frequently enough for defragmenting to
make a real difference.
There's usually no need for Speed Disk's capability to defragment
individual files. That's because you can usually defragment a file
yourself, by simply duplicating it in the Finder. When the file
system creates the duplicate file, it automatically uses only a
single fragment for the file, assuming there is enough contiguous
free space on the disk. Then you can delete the original and
rename the copy with the original file's name.
Alsoft's DiskWarrior 3 offers the unique feature of showing a
graph of a disk's directory, using a color gradient to show items
that are out of order. DiskWarrior's "rebuild" function is usually
used to repair damaged disks, but when used on healthy disks, it
"optimizes" their directories. Although Alsoft calls this feature
"optimization," it's quite different from what all other disk
optimizers do. Other disk optimizers defragment the files on a
disk. DiskWarrior puts the disk's catalog in order.
<http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/>
The catalog is composed of nodes, which contain records that
correspond to files. The nodes form a tree structure, with all the
nodes linked together in a specific order. The file system tends
to keep the nodes in order. But as files are added to and deleted
from the disk, nodes are likewise created, deleted, and shuffled
around, and they can end up out of order. This is not dangerous,
or even wrong, just not optimal.
DiskWarrior reorders the nodes. In theory, this should make a disk
faster for the same reason defragmenting a file makes it faster,
namely that related information is stored together, so the disk's
head doesn't have to seek to distant sectors when retrieving it.
In the real world, I doubt the speed increase is noticeable,
especially since the file system caches key pieces of the catalog
in memory, making access much faster than when the information
is stored only on the hard disk. Disk Warrior is excellent at
recovering disks with damaged directories, but optimizing a
properly functioning catalog is gratuitous.
**Bottom Line** -- To sum up then, for most people, most of the
time, there's simply not enough to gain by optimizing your disk
to bother doing it. There's nothing wrong with optimizing a disk,
and for a severely fragmented disk that is responding slowly when
reading regularly accessed files, it may even be worthwhile. But
in general, it's not necessary and carries a small risk. If you
really want to optimize your disk, the best approach is to make
a backup (with a second backup for safety's sake), reformat your
hard disk, and restore from the backup.
[David Shayer was a senior engineer on Norton Utilities for
Macintosh 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0. Before that he worked on Public
Utilities, a disk repair program that won the MacUser Editor's
Choice Award, and on Sedit, a low level disk editor.]
PayBITS: Glad to learn that you don't need to waste time or
money on optimizing your disk? Thank David via PayBITS!
<http://www.amazon.com/paypage/P12NE4WQ7K8ODD>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
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by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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