Most of us aren’t in classes, so here is a little gem for Mac newbies about keeping your system healthy and speedy by defragging the Mac way (when necessary). This is a tip that I learned from a good friend of mine who is an Apple hardware engineer in Taiwan.
A lot of law students are relatively new to the Mac platform. Which leads to a lot of people asking “Windows-based Mac questions” like “Do I need to defrag my Mac OS hard drive?” This is an understandable question since defragmenting your hard drive is the first line of defense for a slowing “Windoze” PC. Things are a bit different on the Mac. Your Mac OS file system intelligently defrags files below 20 Mgs. For average users, this is practically, all you need. Unless you are doing pro video, photo or audio editing on your Mac, then the vast majority of your files are smaller than 20 Mgs – no defragmenting software needed, right?
Well, yes and no. While your Mac does a great job at preventing file fragmentation (again, for files smaller than 20 Mgs), there is something else called drive fragmentation. Basically what this means is that in rearranging your files in order to keep them unfragmented, your Mac will at times leave small areas of drive space unused in order to complete this task. These small areas can add up to a good bit of wasted space – the effects of which may become painfully apparent as your drive surpasses 90% capacity.
Another problem which can arise is that, as you use your Mac for some time, you will go through several software updates. These updates are often larger than the files they are meant to replace and therefore cannot fit into the same space. This slows your Mac because, for your computer to work at its fastest, related files should be kept physically close to one another on the disk. The effect of this type of fragmentation is minimal, but like anything else, as the process is repeated through various software updates, the effect becomes more pronounced.
Fortunately for you, there are several applications which can help: Tech Tools Pro, Disk Warrior and iDefrag just to name the more famous ones.
Even more fortunately for you, you need not waste your money on any of these because Mac OS X already has a tool you can use to accomplish the very same task: Disk Utility. (If you are unfamiliar with Disk Utility, you will find it in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder)
So what is the process? Well, you will first need to copy your system drive to an external hard drive. That’s right – the whole thing. If you do this over firewire or USB 2.0, it won’t take that long. Next, you open disk utility and click the “Restore” tab. There you will select the source disk from which to restore – you simply drag and drop. The source disk is the disk to which you copied everything. Click restore and let her go. How does this defrag your hard drive? Simple. It erases the disk and rewrites the files, but when it does, it groups your files like a fresh install (fixing the fragmentation which results from continual software updates) and does not leave any empty space between files (solving the drive fragmentation problem).
I hope this helps someone, but remember the basic premise that unless you have a lot of files greater than 20 Mgs and you have used 90% or more of your hard drive, then you probably wouldn’t even gain much of a performance increase by going through this process.
