[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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