Defragment

Archive
1

I'm wanting to "defragment" and optimize files on my Mac.

Has anyone used MacKeeper? And what do you think of it?

Thanks for your help!

 

 

2
wha:

Hugh,

Just curious.  When you say "modern"disk designs, what do you mean by "modern."  In other words, how old would a computer be that doesn't have "modern" disk designs?  Thanks.

It's hard to say but defrag was the thing to do back pre XP. Disk design changed gradually but look at the size of Caches. All disk drives still functional are likely to incorporate the sort of features he mentioned.

3

Hugh,

Just curious.  When you say "modern"disk designs, what do you mean by "modern."  In other words, how old would a computer be that doesn't have "modern" disk designs?  Thanks.

4

I've no experience of Macs but a former hard drive designer I am in contact with states that with modern disk designs (let alone SSD drives) disk defragging does not produce much if any benefit compared with when it was popular back in the olden days!

Several reasons include that:

hard drives no longer park their head off the disk surface when idle and so putting files near the beginning of the disk does not help;

the enormous cache memory on the drive controller card can hold so much data that anything recently accessed or repeatedly accessed is likely to be in the cache and accessed with the speed of solid state memory;

enormous hard drives in Terrabytes -- not the Megabytes that I started before I got on that actually held more than a Gigabyte -- make so-called wasted space of little importance.

So think about whether it is worth while defragging .... except maybe every few months if that makes you happy!

a modern file system like NTFS actually breaks files up into fragments for efficient storage and so putting them together will only lead to more work for the drive

5

Hi DaveZ:

I don't own a Mac but my WOT (Web of Trust) browser extension flags the manufacturer's website as untrustworthy - see the negative reviews for this software at https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/mackeeper.com.

The following articles also warn users about questionable business practices, poor system performance and pop-up ads after the software is installed so it sounds like MacKeeper would fall into the category of a PUP (potentially unwanted program) that should likely be avoided.
      Do not install MacKeeper at https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3691
     What 'MacKeeper' is and why you should avoid it at http://www.imore.com/avoid-mackeeper