Defrag on Mac?

[John Fishback]

Tell us more about your system: what kind of scratch drive, your i/o card or device, how full is the drive, etc. Usually, drives slow as they fill up. And you can trash prefs, repair permissions and run Disk Warrior.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
24″ TV-Logic Monitor
Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Amir Abed]

Your HDD is probably getting close to full. Very rarely do macs need to be defragged and its actually recommend by apple not to do it

[Anthony Popolo]

FCP 4.5, 1.5 GB DDR SDRAM, OS 10.4.11, ATI Radeon 9600 XT, (2)x Maxtor 250 GB hard drives. Scratch disk is allowed on both drives.
(I’m not sure what else may be important).

I don’t think it’s a full/empty hard drive issue since I’ve lately run into the problem regardless of how much hard drive space is available…Not just the FCP capture issue, but just the whole computer running slow…lots of colored beach balls.
I have previously been able to run captures and such to within an inch of the hard drives capacity without much issue. (I delete the captured media after each project is archived).
It seems to be a recent thing. And I honestly don’t believe it’s limited to FCP, but that’s where it affects me the most (and I couldn’t find a Mac general forum).

Any other info I can provide that may help?
Thanks

[John Fishback]

I’d run Disk Warrior at the least. It will optimize your directories and that affects speed as the directories tell the apps where everything’s located on the drives. It’s the first thing I do whenever FCP (or the system) start acting strangely.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
24″ TV-Logic Monitor
Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Anthony Popolo]

Will do. Thanks!

[Steve Eisen]

NEVER capture video to your system hard drive. That will definitely slow you down.

Since you have not done any maintenance on your system, I would recommend buying a couple 1 TB hd’s. Clone each drive and put them into your G5. Copy ANY media you have on your Startup drive to your media (scratch) drive.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Dino]

I agree with Steve. New hard drive. I wont outright state that hard drives slow down as they get older but it is a mechanical devise. regardless a new drive will definitely be faster than what you are replacing.

Rather than a clone, I would do a full reinstall from scratch. All those updates, upgrades, patches, tests, what not over the years leave a mess. I just did this to my first gen Mac Pro and it’s ridiculous how much better it responds.

[Zane Barker]

[Amir Abed] “Very rarely do macs need to be defragged and its actually recommend by apple not to do it”

I know a guy who works as a mac genius at a Apple Store and he once told me that OS X actually does basic defragging in the background. He also aid that there is absolutely nothing wrong with using 3rd party programs like Drive Genius to do a full defrag.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Amir Abed]

Zane I actually heard that before but wasn’t sure if it was true thanks for confirming it.

[Margus Voll]

Hi.

https://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php

For me it works nicely.

Get demo and run analyze then you know how badly your drive is with partial data.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu