Defragmenting HD caused 50% increased performance.. at LEAST

Dan Worley · Post by **Dan Worley** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:17 pm

mhschmieder wrote:Wow, finally some compelling reasons to defrag, which I'll now start doing.

On some other forums (ones I find via Googling), I read "convincing" arguments that defragging could ONLY do harm and was to be avoided at all costs.

The advice here is more relevant to those of us doing audio though, and I know I can trust the sources. I will look into this commercial tool.

Yeah, I don't defrag either. It makes me nervous even though I have three backups. But a friend of mine just defragged his drives and he said large audio projects that were bogging down and would barely run before (or would not run at all) were running smoothly after the defrag. So all this has me thinking.

BTW, the message above mine is SPAM.

c-ya,

Dan Worley

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:22 pm

Dan Worley wrote:BTW, the message above mine is SPAM.

Zapped!

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:39 pm

Phil O · Post by **Phil O** » Fri Aug 05, 2011 6:30 am

Hey, isn't that a picture of a dental floss tycoon?

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Aug 05, 2011 7:46 am

I'm at a floss for words.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Fri Aug 05, 2011 11:42 am

Phil O wrote:Hey, isn't that a picture of a dental floss tycoon?

I heard he was moving to Montana soon.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Aug 05, 2011 12:28 pm

Lots of Baby Snakes in Montana and plenty of room for "Chrissy" (and beer)!

Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer; Chrissy and beer;

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Sat Aug 06, 2011 10:49 am

If you are working off a single drive (say on a laptop) you might find a performance improvement by partitioning the drive and using the new partition for your audio data. The system partition would be maintained separately and defragged by osx under the hood - it would also presumably only change in minor ways. The audio partition would be managed by you and when a project finishes you might clear and reformat the partition. When OS X needs to access your audio data it will be seeking in a different area on the disk in any case so that will not be a cause of a slowdown or added disk activity. New recordings laid down would store as contiguous blocks on the drive and would therefore be read faster.

I can see why that makes sense to you but OS X and modern Macs don't work that way. Too many Apple and Alsoft engineers have told me that OS X de-frags the directory only.

I de-frag about once a year and find 20-30 thousand files fragmented (TT runs a report first). Once, I waited two years and the number was significantly higher. For 600G of data on a 1T drive, 18 hours is not uncommon. I start in the early evening and it's done by morning.

Running separate drives over SATA or eSATA has the promise of a slight performance increase and power users trying to wring every last drop out of their systems are right to do this do this.

Partitioning your main drive as you describe makes things run slower. No amount of theory or opinion changes that. In the pre-G5 days of 33/66/100/133MHz IDE/PATA this made sense - no longer.

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 6:45 am

Just for kicks...

I have this 500G drive sitting in a $19 eSATA dock that I have been using to test/break OS Lion. I did a clean install of 10.6.8, restored what I wanted using Time Machine, re-authorized DP 5 & 6, then upgraded to OS 10.7 and, yesterday, installed DP 7.24.

I have created one new file, a simple 1-track audio that I used to test DP. I have also run Software Update a few times including the new HP Printer update released this morning. I have 342G of data on this drive.

So, this morning, I ran an optimization report in TechTool Pro 6. It shows 963 fragmented files and 7,822 blocks of free space. The only thing that could have caused it is Software Update, I suppose. Any notion that OS X does its own optimization is nonsense. There is certainly no performance hit in a report this low. TTP took 20 minutes to de-frag the files and, 40 minutes later, is halfway through consolidating the free space.

Had it not been for this thread, I would not have thought to check. Again, I did it just to satisfy my curiosity but I thought I would share.

I am long of the opinion that the average user never has to de-frag but A/V users such as ourselves need to once or twice a year. Power users should do it more often, no doubt, but I can't imagine anyone needing to do so more than once a month.

charlesparente · Post by **charlesparente** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 9:38 am

On my Mac Pro [used only for music] I tried defrag on my boot drive about a year ago with Drive Genius.

The results were awful!!

File associations all messed up, slow performance...I vowed never to do it again.

But I do wonder periodically [like after reading these posts] if trying it again may help--or at least to see the percent of fragmentation at those times when performance seems slow.

iDefrag sounds like a safe bet.

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 10:30 am

Yeah, I should have mentioned that Drive Genius put me off of defrag a few years ago.

I plan to pick up iDefrag as soon as all these summer audio sales stop draining my bank account.

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 10:40 am

I have not been impressed with Drive Genius and haven't upgraded any of my Pro Soft apps in years.

TTP has never given me any of those problems and is a lite version is what Apple includes on the AppleCare CD.

iDefrag sounds like an update of the old Alsoft DiskExpress which was very good in OS 7. I do not see the benefits of de-fragging a volume I am booted on, however (is slower a benefit?) so have no reason to spend money there. It is less expensive than a new copy of TTP, however.

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