Defragging is for PCs. Not Macs. - petrologist

Here's another suggestion from Apple:

'TIPS FOR IMPROVING THE FRAME RATE [OF QUICKTIME]

Defragment your disk drive!
A badly fragmented drive impacts performance.'

Because reading & writing files is the bottleneck in most of my computing, I've always spent effort optimizing my hard disks. Windows's disk format was an insult to computing, but Mac OS X, Unix, & OS/2's real disk format simply fragmented more slowly than Windows's.

When consulting, I used to install a program that recorded which files were opened when. Then, after creating partitions for files that didn't grow, &c, as early Unix did, I reinstalled the files in the order opened. This alway had a profound effect.

Doing this with the initialization files on an OS/2 disk decreased the start-up time from over 2 minutes to 20 seconds. (Its high-performance file system resembled MacOSX's.)

A few moments ago my iBook hung, spinning its little rainbow. The system log said there was no space to create another swap file, though my disk has 7Gb free. This may have meant that my real memory was too fragmented to load the requested process; but examining my disk, I didn't see many large, contiguous spaces present. (Unix used to swap processes rather than turn pages when space was low.)

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Wednesday, April 25 2007 @ 03:55 PM PDT