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Personally, I've always favored the practice of backing up, erasing and restoring the contents of my hard drives once in awhile. As a fringe benefit, this process also defrags the drive, as Apple's KnowledgeBase article confirms; and, for those who want to defrag their drives (for whatever reason), erase and restore is probably a much faster method than running a dedicated defragmentation utility. No purchase necessary.

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Oh come on, Macs are -screamingly- gay. They look better, know the latest fashion, have better taste in music, are great lovers, and all the straight computers end up copying them six to twelve months later.

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Before you bash iDefrag into oblivion, there is one good reason to use it: If you get that "could not move certain files" while trying to make a bootcamp partition for Windows, iDefrag moves pretty much all the files to the beginning of the drive, leaving the latter area open for bootcamp to work. It is good for this purpose. I've encountered this problem on my own macbook pro and after running iDefrag, bootcamp could create the partition.

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The only time I've needed to "defrag" was to consolidate files so that there was enough space on the volume to resize partitions (you can't resize of partition unless there is enough free space at the end of an existing partition).

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Fool! When it billows smoke you are supposed to repair permissions.

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Apple explains that defragging the startup volume can slow startup time. From <a class="user" href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375:&quot;&gt;http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375:&lt;/a&gt;&quot;Mac OS X systems use hundreds of thousands of small files, many of which are rarely accessed. Optimizing them can be a major effort for very little practical gain. There is also a chance that one of the files placed in the "hot band" for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance."That is one of the reasons why I have a separate partition for my OS. If I defrag my documents volume, it won't affect the startup time.Apple does not say you never need to defrag."You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X.""For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.""If your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files (such as editing video, but see the Tip below if you use iMovie and Mac OS X 10.3), there's a chance the disks could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities."Of course, it helps if you complete the process.Regarding Speed Disk in OS 9, I tested extensively with careful before-after timing and found no performance gain in startup or intensive Photoshop processes on 20MB files after defragging. At that time, Apple suggested defragging for better rendering reliability in Final Cut. I was not a video processor at that time.

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The two biggest problems with discussing whether to defrag are that (A) it's rarely actually thoroughly investigated by people proclaiming they have The Universal Answer, and (B) the terms are not defined so everyone can speak to the same questions. As others have pointed out, Apple minimizes the need for defragging under MOST circumstances. That spells out that fragmentation DOES take place. If you have a defragger or run a FREE utility to find out, it'll give you percentages of fragmentation on each drive and even each file. If all the figures are under 5% you're PROBABLY okay - unless even one is a critical file. That can create unreliable behavior, in ANY Operating System. Because every damn operating system fragments - some more, some less. Microsoft claimed Win NT didn't fragment at first, until they could no longer deny it. I'm a Mac guy, but OSX does it too, only less. A half-done test is no test at all. Take a look at your own, yourself, for free... The free look-see utility: <a class="user" href="http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18451&quot;&gt;http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18451&lt;/a&gt; The demo of iDefrag: <a class="user" href="http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php&quot;&gt;http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php&lt;/a&gt; There are three kinds of fragmentation and therefore defragmentation: 1. FILE fragmentation is the scattering of pieces of individual files all over your hard disk. OSX does a good job of minimizing file frag under most conditions. Most defraggers for it do ONLY this kind. 2. DRIVE fragmentation is when the files are all over the hard disk with spaces between them, which means when large files are added, they are broken up to fit in those spaces, creating file fragmentation. OSX does NOT correct this files-wherever problem. iDefrag does. No I don't have any ties or profit from them. If you get it, run it only AFTER making sure you've cleared off at least 15~20% of the hard drive to let it work. Otherwise it will churn away inefficiently, which instructions for any defragger will tell you. Ignoring those instructions is not wise. 3. DIRECTORY frag is when the location of info in the directory becomes a confused mess. OSX provides a way to rebuild it. Unless you breathe UNIX commands, Diskwarrior can help here, especially if it has reached the point of erratic operation. But if you're still running from the Hard Disk in question, so can Onyx, a free utility that puts a human front-end on all those cool UNIX system maintenance routines. This link is for the Leopard version, but the others for Tiger etc. are linked on the page. <a class="user" href="http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582/onyx&quot;&gt;http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582/onyx&lt;/a&gt; Directory rebuilding is analagous to Windows Registry repair programs, which I've seen restore system speed and command-launch abilities on quite a few Windows machines. Same here for fixing the Directory in OSX. And I've found Onyx' defaults to be pretty safe. One more critter, often confused with simple defrag: Related to Disk defrag but on top of it, is optimization. OPTIMIZATION is the placement of certain critical files in the best spots for access. OSX has a routine to do this, and Onyx accesses that too. Are we speaking the same language yet? Peas J

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The two biggest problems with discussing whether to defrag are that (A) it's rarely actually thoroughly investigated by people proclaiming they have The Universal Answer, and (B) the terms are not defined so everyone can speak to the same questions. As others have pointed out, Apple minimizes the need for defragging under MOST circumstances. That spells out that fragmentation DOES take place. If you have a defragger or run a FREE utility to find out, it'll give you percentages of fragmentation on each drive and even each file. If all the figures are under 5% you're PROBABLY okay - unless even one is a critical file. That can create unreliable behavior, in ANY Operating System. Because every damn operating system fragments - some more, some less. Microsoft claimed Win NT didn't fragment at first, until they could no longer deny it. I'm a Mac guy, but OSX does it too, only less. A half-done test is no test at all. Take a look at your own, yourself, for free... The free look-see utility: <a class="user" href="http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18451&quot;&gt;http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18451&lt;/a&gt; The demo of iDefrag: <a class="user" href="http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php&quot;&gt;http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php&lt;/a&gt; There are three kinds of fragmentation and therefore defragmentation: 1. FILE fragmentation is the scattering of pieces of individual files all over your hard disk. OSX does a good job of minimizing file frag under most conditions. Most defraggers for it do ONLY this kind. 2. DRIVE fragmentation is when the files are all over the hard disk with spaces between them, which means when large files are added, they are broken up to fit in those spaces, creating file fragmentation. OSX does NOT correct this files-wherever problem. iDefrag does. No I don't have any ties or profit from them. If you get it, run it only AFTER making sure you've cleared off at least 15~20% of the hard drive to let it work. Otherwise it will churn away inefficiently, which instructions for any defragger will tell you. Ignoring those instructions is not wise. 3. DIRECTORY frag is when the location of info in the directory becomes a confused mess. OSX provides a way to rebuild it. Unless you breathe UNIX commands, Diskwarrior can help here, especially if it has reached the point of erratic operation. But if you're still running from the Hard Disk in question, so can Onyx, a free utility that puts a human front-end on all those cool UNIX system maintenance routines. This link is for the Leopard version, but the others for Tiger etc. are linked on the page. <a class="user" href="http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582/onyx&quot;&gt;http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582/onyx&lt;/a&gt; Directory rebuilding is analagous to Windows Registry repair programs, which I've seen restore system speed and command-launch abilities on quite a few Windows machines. Same here for fixing the Directory in OSX. And I've found Onyx' defaults to be pretty safe. One more critter, often confused with simple defrag: Related to Disk defrag but on top of it, is optimization. OPTIMIZATION is the placement of certain critical files in the best spots for access. OSX has a routine to do this, and Onyx accesses that too. Are we speaking the same language yet? Peas J

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I'm using mac for 2 years without reinstalling and format the HD, and I think my mac is still load fast.

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anyone that says you don't have to defrag new windows PC's is an idiot, mac's have to be defragged if the user messes up the file system (IE stopping bootcamp before installing windows on a partition, partitioning and then reverting, etc.) if you plan on partitioning more than once on a HD without a reformat you are going to have to use some sort of defrag

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Defragmenting can be necessary on a Mac. Contrary to your fan boy beliefs the OS is not perfect. I was attempting to install bootcamp for a friend and it wouldn't let us partition the drive to create the partition for windows no matter how small we made it. This was after he had used time machine to backup and restore his drive thinking that might help, it did nothing for the problem. After purchasing iDefrag it showed us the the data was scattered across the drive and a majority of it was towards the end of the drive where it was attempting to create the partition. After rebooting and letting iDefrag do it's job his data was all defragmented nicely and shifted toward the beginning of HFS partition and then we were able to properly partition it with bootcamp.

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