Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile in most cases, ’cause the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation, says KernelThread.
Fragmentation in HFS Plus Volumes
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All Filesystems are vulnerable to Fragmentation as the file sizes increase and Free Space is used up.
If you have a disk with lots of large files, and not much free space, the Filesystem has nowhere to move a file when it is modified.
Modern Filesystems like BFS, ReiserFS, Ext3, HFS+ and NTFS are less suceptable to these problems than earlier Filesystems, but I wouldn’t be Editing that Raw DV Quicktime File on your main hardrive, when you have no diskspace yet, That’s what Scratch-disks are for.
“All Filesystems are vulnerable to Fragmentation as the file sizes increase and Free Space is used up.
If you have a disk with lots of large files, and not much free space, the Filesystem has nowhere to move a file when it is modified.”
Very true, but for day to day use, fragmentation isn’t a big issue. I edit a lot of video and regularly defrag all my drives.
old news
i uses mac os x 10.3 server as a file server and it is a issue. i run a defrag once a year or so and usually by that time it needs it and it does help allot. also prebinding and repairing premisions on os x is a must for preformance
How do you defrag OS X?
10.3 Defrags any files under 20MB on the fly, in the background.