The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Jim called with a question about whether or not it’s safe to defragment an OS X G4 journaled hard drive. He has a sawtooth G4 tower.

OS X’s built-in disk optimization method, in fact, only works for volumes that are formatted in HFS+ and *have journaling turned on.* So, this means in most cases it’s not necessary to defrag your hard drive if you have journaling turned on with OS X 10.2 or later.

Apple has an informative article on OS X fragmentation located here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Want to optimize your Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later system? Try OnyX, a free utility available here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.

Got Pro Applications running? Want more sophisticated utilities and features? Check out the commercial application iDefrag if you have OS X 10.3.7 or later, an “advanced disk optimization and defragmentation tool for Mac OS X, featuring support for the latest HFS+ file system features, including case sensitivity and adaptive hot file clustering, as well as both on-line and off-line defragmentation”:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/idefr

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Advanced, How To, Mid-level, Systems Administration, WGN Radio Show Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.