which defrag software should i get?

satanicpoptart

satanicpoptart

X
my computer is in desperate need of defragmentation.

so, of course i have been looking into defrag software, i know that they are all os9 boot requiring, is there anyway i could run these when booted from the os9 cd?

and which app is the best? ive heard of diskwarrior techtools and some others

-thanks for the advive
 
getting to be my stock answer to this question
for some very complete discussions of defragging, do a site search for 'defrag'. In short plus optimizer from alsoft is the best but techtool pro works wonderfully as well.

and yes they must be booted from os 9, at this point they all do. so you can either wait for somebody to finally make one native while your mac-chine thrashes its way iinto sluggishness and possible destruction, or you can bite the bullet and buy one now and hope the update is either free or cheap.
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also, drive10 now has native os x defragmentation but i haven't upgraded yet so i have no opinion on how well it works. and whatever you do - don't trust your drive to norton.
 
I've experienced absolutely no problems over the last 8 years using Norton Utilities. In fact, on a number of occasions, it's been a lifesaver. I won't argue with the fact that it's not the BEST system utility out there, but I won't go so far as to say it wrecks drives instead of helping them. I don't actually install the program -- I simply boot from the CD and run the diagnostics from there, which has been a perfect way to do it for me over the last 8 years.

Also, why do you think your drive is in desperate need of defragmenting? OS X works a LOT differently from OS 9, and I think if you defrag your drive, you'll find that it becomes severely fragmented (or appears to be) over the next week or so. OS X puts the files where it needs them, and defragmenting doesn't really do much of anything to an OS X drive.
 
OS X works a LOT differently from OS 9, and I think if you defrag your drive, you'll find that it becomes severely fragmented (or appears to be) over the next week or so. OS X puts the files where it needs them, and defragmenting doesn't really do much of anything to an OS X drive.
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i beg to differ my devilish friend :)
both systems use the hfs+ file system and will write to fragments of open space, then continue to the next open space, etc. I notice better performance everytime i defrag. it runs faster, there is less noise from the drives and fewer applications suddenly quiting. in fact, as far as i can tell (and others have confirmed this in other threads), os x does alot more fragmenting due to the huge amount of swapping it does.
obviously there are a lot of factors here that determine how often one needs to defrag - like amount of available HD space, size of cached files and how often and how many files one saves and deletes over a period of time. my internal drive (10Gb) needs it more often than my larger externals as files are contantly being saved and deleted from it with a limited amount of free space. moving my system swap files to one of the externals helps, but doesn't account for all fragmenting.
 
I have Norton SystemWorks 2. It made honorable defragging several times.
I have *tried* Drive10 because a friend of mine has bought it. I still don't understand why I can't boot from the CD: 40 minutes to reach the blue screen, then rainbow cursor and that's all…
 
I have also had modest performance increases from defragging.

BTW, I also use Norton (v. 7). I only use it from OS 9, because the OS X stuff is junk, messes up the machine. From OS 9, though, I haven't ever had problems. I used it to defrag my new flat panel iMac too.

I've heard Diskwarrior is really good for recovering messed up drives. I don't know if it has defrag or how well that would work. And I've read good reviews of Techtool.

Doug
 
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