defrag ?

[David Johnson]

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]

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

Tom

[Todd Gillespie]

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]

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]

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.