Comments on: Do you need disk defragmentation tools for OS X? http://timon-royer.com/en/10/do-you-need-disk-defragmentation-tools-for-os-x/ Thu, 17 May 2012 10:20:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: stingerman http://timon-royer.com/en/10/do-you-need-disk-defragmentation-tools-for-os-x/comment-page-1/#comment-6 stingerman Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:30:30 +0000 http://timon-royer.com/blog/?p=10#comment-6 Keep in mind how a hard drive is designed. Multiple platters with multiple read heads. Thus for larger files, you may actually want them fragmented. On large raided systems, higher fragmentation over multiple drives significantly improves performance. Apple's decision to limit defragmentation to smaller files (I believe 10.3 was 20MB files or smaller, whereas 10.4 went to 40MB) is a nice balance. And as your analysis of your drive shows, it works very well; to the point where fragmentation is not an issue. Keep in mind how a hard drive is designed. Multiple platters with multiple read heads. Thus for larger files, you may actually want them fragmented. On large raided systems, higher fragmentation over multiple drives significantly improves performance.

Apple’s decision to limit defragmentation to smaller files (I believe 10.3 was 20MB files or smaller, whereas 10.4 went to 40MB) is a nice balance. And as your analysis of your drive shows, it works very well; to the point where fragmentation is not an issue.

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