Ableton Forum

Hi Guys,

Just got myself a new MACBOOK PRO 15, love etc...

I do some video work for a living, so do regular downloads and deletes of 700MB files on my MAC HD. Do i nee to purchase a Defrag app like iDefrag and do monster Defrags once a month or should i just use disk repair, in the operating system. I will from now on use an external Drive to download and delete to.

Any suggestions would be great.

DRESIE wrote:Hi Guys,

Just got myself a new MACBOOK PRO 15, love etc...

I do some video work for a living, so do regular downloads and deletes of 700MB files on my MAC HD. Do i nee to purchase a Defrag app like iDefrag and do monster Defrags once a month or should i just use disk repair, in the operating system. I will from now on use an external Drive to download and delete to.

Any suggestions would be great.

Please read the following article first: http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?sto ... 1091515843

As you have mentioned that you primarily work with large files, it makes sense to purchase iDefrag (from Coriolis Systems) - the one and only most reliable and advanced defragmenter for Mac OS X up to date. Running it every two or three months will make you not to worry about the speed of your disk I/O operations.

Andrejs

Mac OS X defrags smaller files automatically (ones under 20MB i think), and does some smart usage of free space... in most cases a defrag app isn't necessary, however if you are dealing with big video files a lot, then defragging may help a bit, especially if your drive has a lot of stuff on it...

iDefrag is a good defragger...

oh, and i've had Techtool Pro's defragger crash on me a couple of times (and it's painfully slow), so i would definitely avoid that...

Yeah, if you are moving large files around (videos, ISOs, etc.) then a defrag once a month or so could be a good thing. idefrag is my favorite amongst the rabble, but you do have to unmount your hard drive to properly defrag it (basically load idefrag off of a start up disc). There is a basic defrag mode, but it does not amount to much at all...

IMHO - before your defrag.

Bakup
Bakup
Bakup

I prob dont have to even mention it, (as your, doing video work for a living), but...

definitely...

idefrag is great, and fast in offline mode. You will not regret it.

Its not just big files on their own that cause fragmentation, you need to have pretty low free disk space as well - then it does all start turning to shit as the free space gets fragmented. But in general, Mac OS X does a pretty good job on managing disks which in most cases means you don't need to defrag - I never believed it myself but it works.

If it was me, I'd spend the money on a larger internal drive rather than a defrag tool and make sure you don't fill it up.

If you've got external drives and you're worried about them, buy a spare external drive. Then (file) copy one of the other drives on to it, then copy another on to the drive you just freed up and so on until you've cycled them all round. This will remove all fragmentation.

idefrag is nice, too bad it can't interpolate though.

had an old pc one that did that back in the day, could tell it to do it on certain folders.

though i suppose these days hard drives are fast enough to not need that anymore.

jonny72 wrote:If it was me, I'd spend the money on a larger internal drive rather than a defrag tool and make sure you don't fill it up.

+1

There is an iDefrag demo, which will analyse your drives and report on the fragmentation. Its well worth downloading this and running it first before buying, the chances are you'll be amazed by the lack of fragmentation on your Mac drives - I know I was.

I'd suggest running the analyse a few times spread out over a few week period and checking whether things are worse or not, if they're not then you most likely don't need to defrag. Once you have a fragmentation problem it will get worse exponentially, as the free space gets more and more fragmented.

If you're coming from Windows (as I did) then its real hard to believe you don't need to defrag, due to the complete and utter mess that Windows would make of a drive. Maybe Microsoft have fixed it, but XP was a nightmare still.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your advice. I bought iDefrag and it worked a charm. From now on i'm going to use a FLASH USB Drive and External Hard Drive to download, process and compress Videos from now on. Regularly downloading and deleting 2GB a week. It does slowy and eventually on OSX, if the files were smaller than 20mb then there is nothing to worry about since osx auto defrags this.

Thanks so much chaps,

Actually i have to say iDegrag has buggered my system to some degree. My computer crashed at startup today frozen on the grey window witht the apple, it also is slower to some degree.

I've come to the conclusion that you are better off and will save time, to just do a fresh install and don't waste 4-6 hours with a Defrag using a boot disk they ask you to download use Coriolis CDMaker.app yo burn. Apple know full well what they are doing and if you do work with large files (over 20MB) use secondary HD to download and process them. If a Mac needed a Defrag it would have one.

I've written this post to save any poor buggers $40 600MB of Download data, 5 hours of research, 6 hours of defrage time and 3 hours of re-installing OSX.

Don't Defrag a Mac it's quicker and much better for your system to just delete and reinstall your OSX

One Pissed of Mac user

oh that sucks...

btw, a much better and faster way to work is to create a small partition on your external drive as a toolkit volume... install Mac OS X on it and any utility apps you use... then boot off the external drive to do things like disk cloning, repairs, and defrags...

even better, also create another partition on the external drive to clone your MBP hard drive to... it is good practice to clone any volume before you do any risky operations like defragging on it... it also means minimal downtime if your internal hard drive or whole computer goes belly up...

actually even the process of cloning with SuperDuper does a reasonable job of defragging your files...

oh, and i would check the disk with Disk Utility and repair permissions on it before you do anything else...