Panther Adds "Auto-defragmentation" ability to our Systems??

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I just saw a post on Apple's discussion pages about reading other technical posts and articles that can be found here:



http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenT...1&m=9900929295



From how I read it, Panther de-fragments files under 20MB on-the-fly. Anyone seen/heard the same information? Are we free (or more free) from the worries of a fragmented system?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 19
    ibrowseibrowse Posts: 1,749member
    Defragmenting your harddrive has never been a problem in OS X, well not to the point where you had to worry about it.
  • Reply 2 of 19
    donnydonny Posts: 231member
    OK? I agree with your statement, completely, in that OS X handles files much more intelligently. However, it seems some such ability exist in OS X 10.3, and this new code was the focus of my post. Honestly, I do not wish to rehash the old debate of whether fragmentation is necessary on the Macintosh platform or not.
  • Reply 3 of 19
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Well, defrag utilities certainly aren't needed now.



    Even if it's a relatively small advantage (I notice that it also moves frequently accessed files to the fastest part of the hard drive) it's just one of those nice little touches that costs almost nothing, functions transparently, and moots that much extra fussing with explicit maintenance utilities.



    Slick, even if its effect is subtle enough not to make the list of advertised features.
  • Reply 4 of 19
    aquafireaquafire Posts: 2,758member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    ...........Well, defrag utilities certainly aren't needed now........"



    Probably the one and only gripe I have ever had with Mac's is around the defrag business.



    I could never understand how it was that my PC buddies could defrag without unmounting the harddrive via an external program such as Nortons' etc.



    They only had to click a button, and the option was built in...



    So could someone please explain this difference to me..as I truly couldn't fathom why Apple neglected this ability in all their older OS systems.



    Was it something simply not physically possible or software wise possible ?
  • Reply 5 of 19
    bartobarto Posts: 2,246member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquafire

    So could someone please explain this difference to me..as I truly couldn't fathom why Apple neglected this ability in all their older OS systems.





    Defragging was only ever necessary in the days of crappy file systems (eg FAT) and small hard drives. Hence, there were never any really good defrag utilities for the Mac.
  • Reply 6 of 19
    aquafireaquafire Posts: 2,758member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Barto

    Defragging was only ever necessary in the days of crappy file systems (eg FAT) and small hard drives. Hence, there were never any really good defrag utilities for the Mac.



    Hmmm..really ?



    "FAT" as far as I recall referred to programs that were designed to work in both 68K & PPC enviroments..

    But Mac never had an inbuilt defrag function.



    Admitedly my experience with Mac started with OS-7 being run on an B&W SE.



    But ...AFAIK nor were any of the earlier mac OS's provided with an inbuilt defrag capacity.



    And some of that softare was apparently pretty dirty as well.



    So at least for me, the mystery remains...
  • Reply 7 of 19
    bartobarto Posts: 2,246member
    FAT = File Allocation Table, available in FAT16 and FAT32 varients. The "Windows file system", replaced by NTFS in the NT series.



    No-one really wants to search the forums for the pages and pages Kickacha (sp?) wrote about defragging.



    Barto
  • Reply 8 of 19
    smirclesmircle Posts: 1,035member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquafire



    "FAT" as far as I recall referred to programs that were designed to work in both 68K & PPC enviroments..




    He's referring to FAT16 and FAT32, Windows 95/98/ME file systems which tend to fragment very easily.



    Norton and FWB's HDT had defraggers for HFS back in the 7.x/8.x-days where small HD sizes made the file system much more susceptible to fragmentation (if you only have 10MB free on your disk and you edit and re-save a 20MB file in Photoshop, the likely outcome will be a fragmented file. If you have "only" 1GB free, the file will be stored without fragmentation).



    Furthermore, the load/store-algorithms in MacOS X (and Win2K/XP) are much cleverer at avoiding and curing fragmentation to an extend.



    Disk defraggers are a thing of the past, they are like RAM doublers (or, on MacOS X, virus scanners) an answer to a problem that does no longer exist, but since they were useful once, a faint collective memory persists about them being necessary.
  • Reply 9 of 19
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Smircle

    [BDisk defraggers are a thing of the past, they are like RAM doublers (or, on MacOS X, virus scanners) an answer to a problem that does no longer exist, but since they were useful once, a faint collective memory persists about them being necessary. [/B]



    And screen savers ! oh wait damnit there back.. damn lcds
  • Reply 10 of 19
    This was on slashdot some time ago:

    http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/1...id=185&tid=190
  • Reply 11 of 19
    screedscreed Posts: 1,077member
    From firsthand experience, NTFS is no better. I check my users' hard drives on occasion and large files like the Outlook mailbox file can sometimes be 7000+ fragments on a relatively vacant hard drive! Sheesh.



    If the file system under Panther does as advertised... then I blew money on Diskwarrrior a month ago.



    Screed
  • Reply 12 of 19
    rokrok Posts: 3,519member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    Well, defrag utilities certainly aren't needed now.



    Even if it's a relatively small advantage (I notice that it also moves frequently accessed files to the fastest part of the hard drive) it's just one of those nice little touches that costs almost nothing, functions transparently, and moots that much extra fussing with explicit maintenance utilities.



    Slick, even if its effect is subtle enough not to make the list of advertised features.




    the one thing i would worry about was if, during all this potential file movement, something like a power outage could kill files that aren't even open, but are int he process of being moved. i assume they could not do this before a journaled file system, right?
  • Reply 13 of 19
    screedscreed Posts: 1,077member
    Correct. From what I've read the defrag functionality and journaling go hand-in-hand.



    But the process of a well thought defragmentation scheme should be:

    Read the fragment

    Write a copy of the fragment to the new position

    Confirm the write

    Delete old fragment copy

    Repeat



    Screed
  • Reply 14 of 19
    big macbig mac Posts: 480member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by sCreeD

    Correct. From what I've read the defrag functionality and journaling go hand-in-hand.



    But the process of a well thought defragmentation scheme should be:

    Read the fragment

    Write a copy of the fragment to the new position

    Confirm the write

    Delete old fragment copy

    Repeat



    Screed




    You're definitely right, that's how it should work, in theory. "In theory, communism works, in theory" - H.J.S. But we're talking about Panther here. If it can destroy firewire drives and corrupt one's home with FileVault with impunity, it can do a lot of other strange things as well.
  • Reply 15 of 19
    Quote:

    Originally posted by sCreeD

    From firsthand experience, NTFS is no better. I check my users' hard drives on occasion and large files like the Outlook mailbox file can sometimes be 7000+ fragments on a relatively vacant hard drive! Sheesh.



    If the file system under Panther does as advertised... then I blew money on Diskwarrrior a month ago.



    Screed




    DiskWarrior defrags the disk directory and optimizes it (thus allowing you to often recover vanished files after a disk crash). It doesn't defrag the actual files. To do that you need something like Drive 10 or the eventually-at-some-point-to-be-released Tech Tools Pro 4
  • Reply 16 of 19
    Ahahah, the comment blocks in the code are hilarious.



    Quote:

    From Ars:

    * -----------------

    * |///////////////|

    * -----------------

    * 0 N (file offset)

    *

    * ----------------- `´`´`´`´`´`´`´`´`

    * |///////////////| } whirr... { STEP 1 (aquire new blocks)

    * ----------------- `´`´`´`´`´`´`´`´`

    * 0 N N+1 2N

    *

    * ----------------- -----------------

    * | ////////| ===}|/////// | STEP 2 (clone data)

    * ----------------- -----------------

    * 0 N shhhwip! 2N

    *

    * -----------------

    * :>POOF!<: |////*gleam*////| STEP 3 (head truncate blocks)

    * -----------------

    * 0 N




  • Reply 17 of 19
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquafire

    Probably the one and only gripe I have ever had with Mac's is around the defrag business.



    I could never understand how it was that my PC buddies could defrag without unmounting the harddrive via an external program such as Nortons' etc.



    They only had to click a button, and the option was built in...



    So could someone please explain this difference to me..as I truly couldn't fathom why Apple neglected this ability in all their older OS systems.



    Was it something simply not physically possible or software wise possible ?




    if you happen to compare the way the mac utils and pc ones defrag, you will notice the pc ones always have a nice chunk of 'unmovable' data, and the macs dont, thats because the macs can defrag everything, whereas the pc cant because its still running the os on the drive.
  • Reply 18 of 19
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    And that would be a rather important thing to defrag. Never thought of that. The topic on Slashdot is interesting: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/1...id=185&tid=190



    Apple is really packing in some uber cool features under the radar. I have to say I'm real impressed. This auto defrag is turned along side journaling, and having lost an drive before I am definitely going to activated Journaling.





    However what is everyone's thoughts on this:



    Quote:

    "Drives are defragged to allow the OS to access the files faster."



    Are you so sure?



    I have talked with a senior OS designer (one of the non-free ones) and his view is that these days, defragging does more damage than it saves.



    Why? Drives generally have large caches on them and multiple platters / read heads.



    Noting this, the fastest way to get data off a drive might not be a straight line. Its looks pretty when you run the different utilities and makes the home makers of whom believe everything should be put away neat and tidy, but the engineer had mentioned that being defragged means you loose a lot of advantages of those multiple readheads and cache. He claimed that it was actually better to leave your drive to its own devices, allowing for about 30% free space at all times, and you will see a speedup over a defragged drive.



    I didn't believe it at first, but his arguments did make a lot of sense even though it went against everything I had learned before. He actually mentioned if he had his choice, he'd make certain defraggers would NEVER work, but the market believes that these are necessary so its easier to have these things included as well as supporting third parties, so its there.



    Would it slow down or speed up a drive, and how about a PowerBook drive that I'm always squeezing down to the last few hundred megs, to the point where OS X sometimes nags me to free up space.
  • Reply 19 of 19
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    Even if it's a relatively small advantage (I notice that it also moves frequently accessed files to the fastest part of the hard drive)..



    This is off topic: how does one arrange the OS to be on the fastest part of the hard drive during installation/partitioning? Would it be at the top of the partition box or the bottom part?
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