File fragmentation. Do you think it really matters when it comes to system performance?

When files get written to a hard drive, they are usually placed where ever there is a big enough chunk to place the entire file. All of this space in one large chunk is contiguous file space. If there is not enough contiguous file space to write the file, the file will get written in numerous smaller chunks where ever there is enough room for them to go. The file gets broken down in to fragments. When you need to access that file later, the disk has to go grab all of those fragments, put them together in memory, and present them to you as your one large file. Now make a change to that file. Anything at all. When you save it back to the disk it has to write all of those fragments where ever it can find space for them.

Supposedly, modern operating systems like Windows2000 (or newer) and Apple’s OS X are supposed to handle those fragments better than older operating systems. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but I can remember a time when Microsoft stated that fragmentation was not really an issue with the NTFS file system. Today the tune has changed and there is a defragmenting utility included with the operating system. Some people even have disks that are so fragmented that they can’t boot up.

So I started to do a little research and decided that OS X could probably use a little defragging itself. This all started because my beautiful little 12″ Power Book gets incredibly hot to the left of the track pad, right under my left wrist. Directly under the skin of the PB is the hard drive. Under it is the Airport Extreme wireless card. I figured that the heat that I was seeing might just be from all the spinning that the hard drive had to do. I thought that the drive could be working harder than it needed to due to excess file fragmentation. Doing a little research at the Apple forums showed that many people actually recommend defragmenting and most recommended the program Drive10. Not too many recommended Norton Utilities 8 for the Mac due to numerous problems with older versions, but I did find some people that have had no problems at all with the newer version. Forums are a funny thing, most of the people that post there have problems and are in search of help to fix them, so most of the posts tend to come of a little negative. Take that with a grain of salt when you frequent anyone’s forums for help.

So I headed to my local CompUSA store today in search of Drive10. It was nowhere to be found. But, sitting right there in front of me was Norton Utilities 8, so I picked is up instead. Loading it was very easy and I made sure to run the LiveUpdate program to make sure I had any patches that Symantec may have released since publishing the CD. What I was really after was the program Speed Disk. I remembered it from the PC world and always found it to work very well for me. Speed Disk recommended that I run the optimizer from the bootable Norton CD since I was trying to optimize my boot volume. That was easy enough and it then recommended that I run Norton Disk Doctor before running Speed Disk. So I did. NDD found a lot of problems that it marked as major, which made me a little nervous, I am still new to the Mac world and am not completely sure how to recover from disaster yet, as I am in the PC world. So I blindly followed Norton’s on screen advice and allowed it to fix all my problems. And it did. Then I could run Speed Disk, which took well over an hour to complete, but showed that my previously severely fragmented disk now had no fragmentation. Impressive, but I doubt that I would really have none.

Then I booted back in to regular OS X and started up my regular programs. Immediately I noticed a difference. Fewer bounces to start up an application. Faster feel all around. Is it a tremendous difference? Not really, but it is a noticeable difference and was enough of a difference that I feel it was worth the cost of the software. I have now set it to run defragmenting nightly at midnight in the background while I am, hopefully, asleep.

Will any of this work for you? It depends. If you do decide to invest in or run your current defragmentation tool, back up your data first so that you can recover in case of disaster. Oh, I almost forgot, my left wrist is no longer on fire as I write this. Maybe the drive isn’t working as hard as it was before so it might spin a little less, which should translate to running a little cooler. Your mileage may vary, so don’t get upset with me if you try this and have any issues, but for me it was worth the money.