[thelist] Defrag software for mac osx
Stephen Rider
evolt_org at striderweb.com
Mon Feb 2 09:31:43 CST 2004
Hi --
The best place for this kind of question is the support boards at
Apple's website -- <http://www.apple.com/support/>, bit I'll give you
quick rundown here. The Apple boards are very friendly and have
answered a heck of a lot of obscure questions very quickly, much less
straightforward ones like this.
I would recommend AGAINST using Norton Utilities on OS X. Look at the
Apple boards and you will see way too many horror stories of Norton
fragging hard drives. You _definitely_ can mess things up using
utilities meant for OS 8 or 9 on OS X, as they are totally different
environments and the utilities can get confused while rummaging around
your system. That notwithstanding, the Norton Utilities that are
_designed for_ OS X have developed a reputation for messing up
otherwise sound drives. Norton dropped the ball with OS X, and has
lost a lot of trust among Mac users.
(Norton AntiVirus is about the only Norton product I would -- and do --
use on OS X.)
I personally use DiskWarrior 3 by Alsoft, which examines your hard
drive and writes a completely new directory from scratch, rather than
trying to repair a damaged one. It does not defrag, but it is my
understanding that with Unix-based OSes (such as OS X), defragging is
not nearly as important as with Windows or old Mac OSes. Supposedly
they do so much writing of temporary files and such that even if you do
defrag it's fragged again in about ten minutes. What Disk Warrior
does, (besides saving your bacon if your disk gets corrupted), is
optimize the disk's directory, which does seem to speed things up a
bit.
If you still think you need to defrag, a pretty good utility is Drive
10 by Micromat. TechTool, by the same company, is also a popular
utility, but I don't know if it defrags or not -- worth checking out
though.
BTW, pretty much any utility that is going to fix a messed up hard
drive is going to make you boot from a disk other than that drive. You
can either boot from the CD or boot from another hard drive, but (on
Mac at least) they pretty much unmount the drive they are going to fix,
and you can't unmount the boot drive.
Steve
On Jan 30, 2004, at 9:44 PM, Joshua Hmielowski wrote:
> any one familiar with good defrag software for osx?
> I currently have used Norton system works 9.2 and that worked before.
> However , if I have major problems on my hard drive,
> it has to be booted from the disc. For what ever reason I can run it
> from the
> disc but I get an err every time and it does not fix anything.
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