Hard Drive Defragmentation on OS X
 

PLEASE, those of you who think there is no need to defrag hard drives on the OS X, don't waste your time responding.

Me? A Digital Media man with tons of video editing, constant recording, editing of audio, video, and my hard drives are frazzled.

What do I do? What is the best solution beside a reformat and re-install?

As things are now, my drives are going to soon be fried.

I have a Terabyte drive, and then a 3/4 TB drive on a PowerPC G5, running OSX 10.4.

I don't want to knock anyone, but I ran iDefrag and after doing so, it seems my drives are magnified a dozen times over in the problem. Just switching from one application to another there is an incredible amount of scanning going on. No precussion instrument in the world can make the noise my hard drives do when scanning for data now.

I'd love to hear any suggestions by any of you who are hard hitting video editors or otherwise have or recognize the need for defragmenting when drives are as these are.

And how full are the drives? 200 gigs free on the 1 TB, and about the same on the 3/4 TB.

Please, don't register here and tell others how not to respond. It's rude and insulting to the people here who tend to be quite knowledgeable about Mac OS X.

This is actually the use case where fragmentation is a problem. For most people, it's not necessary, and that's why people usually question the need for defragmentation. For your kind of use, however, it can be a legitimate concern. The same very knowledgeable people I mentioned above also understand this, which makes your first sentence that much more insulting.

I think erasing the drive and then reinstalling your files from a backup is still the best way.

Agreed. It's fast and practically guaranteed to work.

Chastisement Agreed With
 

Mikey-San,

I agree with your chastisement, and actually this morning, with the post still there I just went to edit that first line as it appeared extremely lame to take such an approach and didn't portray the message and spirit I would wish to convey to people I would most deeply want to obtain advice from. When I wrote that first line initially, it seemed rather out of bounds for me, and not my usual way of expression. Unfortunately, attempting to edit my post was denied as it's been up too long. It represents a bit of a reactionary stance on my part by asking this question all over the place and having people who are real Mac guru's tell me that there is never a need to defrag ones hard drive on the OS X. I wish they could come here mine at work.

So, a quick question then. If I transfer data from one drive to another, how does it write it? I attempted to solve this problem I have now by the purchase of the 1TB drive. I copied my previous drive right to the new one, thinking all of that data would have been written to the new drive without the fragmentation, but when I operated the newly installed 1TB drive, it acted just the same. It was then that I got iDefrag.

If a re-install be the best bet I have, do you have recommendations on how to proceed with a backup? I've never done a full backup as yet, and it is something I loath, for I have a ton of apps to reinstall.

I'll appreciate any recommendations and guidance on this issue, and would gladly retract that stupid first and opening line if I could.

If fragmentation is a big issue for you, then you might be a prime candidate for an SSD. No moving parts = no wear.

Fragmentation is not the ONLY reason that a drive might be noisy when accessing files. Do you also run regular checks with Disk Utility, or other drive 'health' utilities?

A normal file copy from one drive to another would naturally defragment the files.
Would this work for you? :
Use drive (a) for your work files. At the end of the work week (for example), copy the files from drive (a) to a newly erased drive (b), which would then be used your work files. End of the week, copy the files from drive (b) to the newly erased drive (a), and etc. The time interval to transfer to a 'clean' drive could be shorter (or longer as you feel the need). Or, maybe not a practical solution.......
As fragmentation is an issue for you, and the type of computer work that you do, maybe this could help keep fragmentation from becoming a long-term issue.
Another thought - you could consider higher speed storage, such as a RAID array. You can spread the potential for problems among a number of drives, and (in theory) the issues resulting from drive fragmentation would be less of an issue...

I thank you guys for the feedback and great helps.

I love the thought of SSD, but currently not within the financial realm to go that route yet, though I get excited at the affordability to increasingly materialize.

And Delta Mac,

I attempted such a copy from the old drive to the new, but somehow I thought the performance to be the same, having me think all my disc wrote to the newly formatted drive in the exact fragmented state. It would seem obvious that it would defrag the files when moving to the new drive.

At this point, any suggestions on backing up, even for the possibility of hard drive failure, which I'm getting nervous about given the unheard of frazzled head on these drives scanning for info. Also, I have used Disk Utility to check and verify disks. I better do so again, as it's been 3 or more weeks. Last time all was well.

What would you folks recommend doing to ensure a good backup? Is there a program that is best to do so, that will take all my important stuff and settings and back them up, Mail, Safari Bookmarks, Keychain items? I don't dare dream there would be such a package that too would backup specializations to programs such as Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's Final Cut Pro, for example.

Making a backup seems like something to be highly loathed, at least when one doesn't have much time to do so, but I fear I need to do it and re-install, for these hard drives are right now in suicide mode, and certainly, from what I've read, have absolutely lost "optimization" with that phony defrag program I ran, which I won't mention the name of again.

Would any of you recommend this, Data Backup 3.0?

http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=3049

I think I'd recommend spending your money on upgrading to Leopard and then using Time Machine.

Back up every time you reach a point where you have something to lose.
(This is why auto backup software like Time Machine is so useful. The backup is never more than an hour out of date.)

If you have the world's best backup software but you run it so infrequently that you don't have a backup of the last week of work, the software's wasted.

All the good programs (Time Machine, SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner...) will just back up everything so that you never have to pick and choose or worry if something important got left out. This requires that you have another disk just as big as the one you're backing up.

Thanks for the good feedback.

In getting Time Machine (with an upgrade of the OS), I would then need to set up a good backup drive. Any of you have any good thoughts on that?

This looks appealing, but perhaps a little pricey:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../ME8Q7T10GB32/

What kind of external drive setup might any suggest?

Time Machine keeps snapshots from multiple points in time, so it is important that you have a disk that is larger than the sum of the drives you're backing up. Otherwise, you miss out on the power of Time Machine.

Time Machine makes this storage requirement easier but not performing a full backup each hour; each snapshot only requires your Mac to back up what's changed from the last time Time Machine backed up. (Things that have not changed from the last backup are simply hard-linked, which does not balloon the size of the backup.)

He's right the Time Machine disk should actually be larger so that you can keep versions.

I haven't bought that specific one but I can tell you that I buy similar drives from that company, I do prefer them. The new eSATA port is the fastest if you can afford to also add an eSATA card to your G5, and if not that then FireWire 800 is faster than anything else on the G5.

As a video editor I thought I'd chime in. Editing programs like Final Cut Pro, Avid etc. are built to work with fragmented media drives, and defragmenting media drives is by and large highly discouraged, especially if there's a RAID configuration. How full are your drives? They should never have less than 10 to 15% free space on them. Also, are you storing any media on your boot drive? It should always be on a seperate drive and will definitely affect performance if it isn't. You can also try repairing permissions and using Disk Warrior on the drives. These things can really help. But...if the drives are making weird noises it sounds like there's more serious problems than fragmentation or directory damage. Hope this is helpful.

I'm not a FCP user, so do you have a source on this?

Repairing permissions will not have an effect on the performance of your computer.

Both topics are covered here: http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_trouble.html

Covered badly, yes.

edit: (he has no idea what he's talking about there)

thanks for the link to this site - i looked at his latest newsletter and found the answer to an ongoing problem that i have been having with FCP. brilliant.

Heh, Mikey-San you're something else.

Larry Jordan is a highly respected, Apple-certified media consultant and broadcast editor, among other things. Oh, and here's another forum for video professionals who talk along similar lines. You can go set them all straight if you like. http://forums.creativecow.net/forum/applefinalcutpro

I think that Mikey-San like many posters here is only interested in ensuring this site has the right info.

If anybody's website says that you should repair permissions on a weekly basis, that to do this you should safe boot your machine before repairs, and restart it afterwards, and for further info one should read about drive journaling, then this tells me two things: -

1. The user doesn't know what he is talking about,
2. If by some very strange reason, he does benefit from doing such things to his computer, then there is a far more serious underlying issue that he would be advised to address.

I think most people here would agree that I know a little something about permissions in Mac OS X.

Please read:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/re...issions_voodoo
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000410.php

Here's the real story about file defragmentation in Mac OS X, which as you will see, does not apply to extremely large files (as a Final Cut user might encounter):
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showpo...2&postcount=10

Yes, I've come across these articles before. I guess time will tell whether it's truly a "myth" about repairing permissions. Nevertheless, right or wrong, repairing permissions is frequently noted as a basic maintenance step for FCP....and as your articles state it isn't exactly doing any "harm", even if it may be useless. And I still don't think it's fair to write off the author's credibility like that. He may not know the inner workings of OS X as well as some people here, but regarding editing system matters, I'll put more trust in him and other experienced editors.

Heck, I don't even know if the original poster is actually using FCP, I just hope he gets the help he needs and simply tried to impart what information I've learned.

"We don't really understand how Mac OS X works, but I believe him!"

It's completely fair to write off the credibility of a technical article when the author has no idea how the system works. I dunno what kind of science you practice, but that's how I roll.

edit: It also doesn't help his credibility that he's wrong.

Thanks, best of luck on your mission and be sure to bug Apple and FCP developers to let them know we've been in the dark all these years.

I am not sure this would be the greatest idea. I think that drive would become full in no time and be pretty useless as a defrag backup. If the idea is to wipe out the original drive and the copy over a backup then I would use superduper or CCC and not Time Machine.