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Re: Slow HD...



In 1986 I was doing support-development at a software company and was asked to work with some folks on software destined for the Mac, evaluating products proposed to the firm for further/ultimate development etc (in this case the ill-fated dBASE Mac was chosen over a more robust and functional dBASE environment).  For a few months we had to assimilate characteristics of the hardware-software-firmware running on the "little toaster", in order to anticipate possible development problems etc.
 
The fellow writing the memory/disk allocation routines was having the worst time of all, despite having come from a 64000 environment.  One night I dropped by to drag him out to eat dinner, and he said he'd figured out why the memory-disk pre-allocation was such a problem on the Mac.  He cleared off one of his desk areas and grabbed a bunch of 720k 1.44" diskettes, and said, "This is how the Mac manages free memory and disk space...", beginning a monologue on the part of the machine, "Hm, prefetch... HERE", tossing a disk on the tabletop, "and here", another disk, tossed someplace randomly, "and here's the database loaded," another disk randomly tossed... and so on, until around 10 diskettes laid on the table, none overlapping, but with lots of free tabletop (free ram) between each.  And we thought that having a whopping 5MB hard drive would help!
 
It would appear that not much has changed in this regard on the Mac.  Or has it?
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 9:44 AM
Subject: OT : Slow HD...

"supposedly, defragging a mac disk is unnecessary. not sure if that's true, but that's what i heard."


Well you have to keep in mind several things

1) OSX defrags only small files. In case of audio and video files, you can have files too big for OSX to act
2) OSX defrag doesn't include pulling of free space like soft used to do. Basically free space becomes a mess. And anytime you use it, it becomes harder, especially if you filled your drive.
That is partly why, among other reasons, it is often advised to not too fill your disk. With proper disk management, it wouldn't be necessary.

This is why I would advise anyway still to use an utilitary soft to perform this.

One may not agree with me though.

Olivier