Message
Re: [Logic_Cafe] defrag by booting off another computer.
2005-02-09 by GAmoore@aol.com
In a message dated 2/9/05 6:11:55 AM, agreenbu@... writes:
: Here is an interesting tidbit. If you have a X-boot only machine (ie. G5),
: this tech support guy says that you can boot off of another computer (eg. an
: ibook g4 which is dual boot) into 9, and run 9 utilities - in particular
: PlusOptimizer to defrag the harddisk.
This sounds pretty dangerous to me. There are a lot of special things in
the OS X filesystem that OS 9 doesn't know or care about, so it's
important that whatever OS 9 utility you use for this handles them safely.
Defragmenting probably doesn't have that much potential for destruction,
but I'd be curious to know if this might screw up drives with journaling
enabled.
I have heard it both ways - about defragging an X drive. But it seems X does not defrag itself, so its a confusing situation.
That message came from Alsoft (the maker of Diskwarrior) which would seem to be fairly authoritarian. Diswarrior 3.02 claims to be "X native" and is one of the leading disk utilitties - and it was recommended in a MacWorld article recently along with other maintence programs.
I wrote to them because I ran Diskwarrior, and i got a message back saying that (although I had 6 g free on the disk) that there wasn't 91mb of contiguous space to do a safe directory re-write - so I was asking how that was to be accomplished.
I wish Apple would clear this matter up. We have heard of the ills of fragmented files for years - and it would cut down track counts and such in digital audio.