What can I use to "Disk Optimize" Panther and my other drives?

For what purpose are you doing this? If it's not necessary right now, I'd say wait until those programs are re-released for Panther.
 
arden said:
For what purpose are you doing this? If it's not necessary right now, I'd say wait until those programs are re-released for Panther.
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My drives are used for recording music via Logic, and it's a good idea to optimize the drives every couple of days. Is there not a program available?

Thx
 
I have Norton 8, and Disk Warrior 3, but I was told they don't work with 10.3.
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The reason these won't work with X.3 is that file journaling is turned on by default and these programs can not as yet optimise journaled volumes. Having not yet rushed out to buy Panther I can't give any suggestions as to how to turn it off.
 
I know Cocktail (and other similar, free programs) can enable/disable journaling... I'm not sure how well they work in Panther though.
 
The newest version of Cocktail, v3.0b1, will disable Journaling with no problem.
But I would wait for Alsoft to release the update to DiskWarrior 3 before using it regardless. Norton's, wouldn't use this at all.
 
Why do you really wanto to disable Journaling???

It looks ok and it works good for me! :D

Well, my powerbook with journaling looks as fast as my Dual with 10.2.8

And it is safe!!!
 
Cocktail isn't required to disable journaling. Simply launch Disk Utility in the Utilities folder, highlight the OS X partition (or whatever partition you want journaling disabled on) and go to the File menu and select "Disable Journaling".
 
Journaling is on for both my Powerbook and desktop running Panther and both run great. Don't know if turning it off would make any difference.
 
OS X 10.3 brings journaling to the desktop version of OS X -- that article is great at describing what it does but maintains that journaling is better suited for servers... which is only partially true.

Basically, journaling keeps a "journal" in files on your hard drive that keep track of the "last known good state" of your drive. If the power goes out and some files get corrupted or what not, the system looks at the journal of the drive and compares what changes or damage has been done, and can make fixed according to the journal files.

It's great -- as a user that has had his OS X installation completely hosed by power outages, this is a welcome addition to OS X.
 
While we're on the subject, I've never defragged since going X... is there an app that does it? I would really like to clean things up for peace of mind.
 
If you can boot into OS 9, you can use DiskWarrior or Norton Utilities (latest versions, of course) to defragment an OS X drive. Just make sure that your file system is NOT journaled, since I don't know of any utilities that'll defrag a journaled drive yet, and they'll screw it up big time if the drive IS journaled and you try to defragment or optimize the drive.

There is some question as to how much benefit defragging has on an OS X drive, or if there is even a benefit at all, since OS X moves files around like crazy, and I've heard that UNIX has an "auto-defrag" of sorts of its own... it's doesn't really defrag, but it moves the files and the bits of files in the order that it likes the most. So even if you defrag, you'll see that OS X quickly "frags" it up again.
 
I always get the feeling that once I've deleted something, say a naughty thing, that its still there on the drive, just no longer indexed. :p
 
Oh yeah, it's still there for sure, unless some other file has overwritten the blocks that the previous file was on, or unless you "wipe the free space" on your drive, meaning writing zero-bytes to the unused space on your drive... hehe...
 
[qoute]or unless you "wipe the free space" on your drive, meaning writing zero-bytes to the unused space on your drive... hehe..[/qoute]

and how does someone who feels guilty and paranoid go about wiping the free space?
 
Norton Speed Disk offers this option as part of the optimization process, but be warned: it does NOT work with Panther or journaled file systems.
 
There is now a secure delete facility in Panther. Files deleted in this manner can never be recovered. Great if you decide to sell your Mac with just the system installed on it (a quick format does not get rid of data and can still be recovered).
 
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