It will take iDefrag around three hours to run through its magic on the same volume. ![]() It will take Disk Utility or SuperDuper! a couple of hours to clone a 100GB volume. To accomplish that you'll need to use a utility like iDefrag, which accomplishes the defragmentation and file rearrangement in one pass. Yes, cloning your drive using an application like Disk Utility or SuperDuper! will create a completely defragmented volume, sans the disk caches and other system support files that the system will rebuild automatically when the new volume is booted, but that will not rearrange the files on your hard drive. ![]() In any case, I recommend to anyone who doesn't like to deal with strange Mac behavior that clearly isn't a bug affecting a lot of people to take these steps. I've frequently noticed complaints in forums about some latest update that hosed a user's system, but worked flawlessly on mine, only to wonder if these people were truly compromising their systems with buggy software, then blaming it on Apple, or whether they simply had never taken the recurring time to perform this simple maintenance. Running through this regimen every month or two (like routine maintenance on your car) has kept my systems purring along perfectly for years. I want my system to perform at its best, and periodically running DiskWarrior to rebuild/optimize the directory structure on the hard disk, then iDefrag to put the pieces of fragmented files back together at one location on your hard drive, and finally with iDefrag then rearranging the consolidated files to locations on your hard drive closer to the central hub of the hard drive platters to reduce disk access time, based on the type of file and frequency of its access, has kept my systems performing both speedily and reliably. That said, I've always been a bit anal about optimizing my system. Also, today's drives are very fast, so it's harder to notice any delay the system takes to put back together all the pieces strewn all over your hard disk platters before it can open the file. I'm not sure about Leopard, but Tiger used to automatically defragment files smaller than 20MB, which is most of the stuff on your system (less music, photos, and video which can easily exceed this threshold). Many don't care to spend the time a program takes to optimize their system. The iDefrag upgrade/AHCI bug fix worked perfectly, so I thought I'd post here so others would know that iDefrag now successfully works both with Leopard and resolving the stalling issue that the previous version 1.6.4 manifested. ![]() That also now works great, by the way (just be sure your have a pristine directory structure on the copied volume first). The symptom they reported was similar, with the application stalling after 20 minutes or so whenever the Mac was doing constant reading/writing, essentially stress testing the hard drive, so I upgraded and gave it a try.Ĭoncurrently, SuperDuper! for Leopard was released and I cloned the startup volume so I'd have a working copy should my experiment not work out. Recently, Coriolis-Systems upgraded their excellent product to version 1.6.5 and noted that it now worked running from Leopard and resolved an AHCI bug they had identified in Apple's software. At the time I was using iDefrag 1.6.4 and performing the defragmentation/optimization running from a MacOS X 10.4.11 volume. However, after setting up my new 2.8GHz iMac with Leopard I found iDefrag would stall after around 20 minutes of chugging away. For years I've used iDefrag to defragment files, then optimize the file arrangement, on my hard drives to maximize performance.
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