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:

Idiosyncrasies.org offers up a delightfully comprehensive guide for those making the leap from Windows XP to Apple’s OS X. The article gives a great list of comparable features, keyboard shortcuts, and websites where you can nab useful free software. All in all, an easy and informative read even for those well versed in OS X.