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defragging drives
Does anyone use defrag tools for their media drives? I haven’t on my Macs since OS 9, but I’ve been reading that OS X only defrags on the fly for files under 20 MB, and only on internal drives.
I know that ideally, I would clone my media drive, erase it, and then copy the data back. But I can’t do that because I have 4 GB of my XRAID (formatted as a single RAID-50 drive), plus another 1 TB RAID-1 full, and I have no other 4+ GB drive available.
Anyone tried iDefrag or Drive Genius on a media drive? Is it safe enough to use once in a blue moon?
Also, I know it’s not for defragmenting, but I see lots of glowing reviews here for Disk Warrior. Has anyone ever had it hose their drive while using it for maintenance?
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5 Replies
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Hi Brad,
Forget about defrag disks. Thats an operation from the old times.
Run DiskWarrior or TechTools to keep your directories clean and your system will have no problem to track fragmented files.
I’ve read somewhere that FC on capturing chop the files so is easy for him to manage them.
rafael -
I use Drive Genius about once a month, it is great. I use Leopard Cache Cleaner about once a week, and as a result, have very few problems.
Have a wonderful day.
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You’d want to use a mapping application to examine your drives before considering defragmentation. Your possible read/write access times improvements are determined by the amount of fragmentation and the size of your files (and what code is in use) compared against the inherent latency times of your drives and the amount of onboard caching plus the RAID system caching. That is, if your drives and caches outperform your media format, there’s no need to defrag.
Defragmentation is s difficult topic to discuss objectively because of the variables. Current advice on Macintosh defrag practices is extensively covered on advanced discussion groups. google it and preapre for a few hours of careful research before you decide to attempt the operation. As you say, it’s best to clone the drive and copy back.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Thanks for all the replies. So if I clone 1 TB at a time and rebuild the directory structures with Disk Warrior, would that essentially be the same as cloning the whole drive and erasing it?
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Cloning a media HD doesn’t makes much sense for me. Cloning is OK for a system HD where there are files and folder structures that you can not keep otherwise.
For a media drive just copy the files somewhere else and reformat.
Thats something recommendable to do now and then.
rafael
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