• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  defrag ?

  Posted by Tom Maloney on May 14, 2006 at 11:58 am

  Hi all, being new to MAcs and FCP is there a way or need to defrag hard drive as done on the pc ?

  thanks
  Tom

  David Johnson replied 20 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  David Johnson

  May 14, 2006 at 12:21 pm

  Apple and many Mac users will tell you no, but any good Mac Tech will tell you there is both a need and a way. Unfortunately, that’s all I can tell you since we have a Mac Tech who takes care of maintenance for all our Macs. I have seen the difference it makes though.
• 

  Tom Maloney

  May 14, 2006 at 2:38 pm

  Thanks for the reply, maybe someone else here will be able to inform me

  Tom
• 

  Todd Gillespie

  May 15, 2006 at 6:30 pm

  Hi Tom,
  Not to go against a good poster like Dave, but I’ve heard the EXACT opposite from our Apple gurus.
  When your Mac boots, (since OSX) does a partial defrag everytime-on the local HD. It goes beyond my understanding but, it can really screw up how Mac finds the files. Plus you want a certain amount of fragmentation for your media files, it actual helps. (you shouldn’t be storing any media on your local HD) If your drives get really bad, then you need to either reformat the drives or clean install for a local HD. This is also why you don’t see any software that defrags for a Mac, it’s not a good thing.
  But like a lot of things, different users have different beliefs. Kind of like Bigfoot. 😛

  FWIW

  Todd at UCSB
  Television Production
• 

  Tom Maloney

  May 16, 2006 at 11:56 am

  Thanks all for all the info, I am new to Mac and Fcp , starting out on the Pro 17 with a ext hd. Am sure to have a lot mor equestions, so far so good

  thanks
  Tom
• 

  David Johnson

  May 19, 2006 at 1:39 am

  I should clarify that I don’t claim to be a computer guru…just going on what our guys say and the fact the our Macs seem to run a lot better than under the care of the previous no-defrag regime.

  We don’t put anything on our local HDs except software, but I’m pretty sure our very accomplished Mac Techs defrag them. What they’re doing works well so I’ve left it alone, but now I’m more curious and plan to inquire more…if I learn anything useful on the subject, I’ll post.

  We use a 2TB X-Serve RAID on one system and are putting a 1TB FireWire800 on the other so I’m very cuirous to know specifically why we’d want a certain amount of fragmentation of our media files and how it helps. Both systems have hundreds of GBs of media files that are constantly accessed, moved, rewritten, etc. so reformatting is not a practical option for us since its not that easy to move that much media.

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