Hi. A friend of mine has recently bought a new iMac, with OSX. Is it true that this OS does not need to be defragmented at the usual periods, like any Windows OS ? Many thanks.........Chris...

The Mac OS has always been more resistant to disk fragmentation than Windoze, and even bad fragmentation won't affect the Mac OS as much as it does Windoze. I've found very little difference on OS 9 systems before and after defragging with fragmentation levels as high as, oh, about 30-40%. I haven't bothered to defrag my OS X installation since I got my new PowerBook but I rather doubt it would be worth my time or money to do so. p

Yeah, thatīs absolutely right. Mac OS doesnīt really need to be defragmented. I work with my 1st installation of my Mac OS and I didnīt use Defrag up to now. No problem or slowing down occured up to now. So I absolutely agree, defragmentation on a Mac is only waste of time.

I totally disagree with the previous posters. Defragmenting my macs has always resulted in speed increases for me. I imagine the difference between my results and theirs is that they still have lots and lots of free drive space. However, as soon as you cross the 2/3 or 3/4 mark of drive capacity, fragmentation becomes a much bigger issue, especially if you are doing multitrack audio or something disk intensive of that sort. A decent way to defragment your drive is if you have Norton Utilities. In the Norton Utilities is a program called Speed Disk. This is actually a rewrite of Defrag (for PCs). The only requirement is that your drive not be in extended format. MacOS extended format was introduced at about OS 8, so an iMac is probably already using Extended disk format, even though it doesn't really provide much extra disk space efficiency. It does provide FAT32 PC support, but that's a PC compatibility issue. If you can afford to reformat your drive as a normal (non-extended) volume, then you will then be able to use even an old version of Norton Speed Disk to defragment your volumes. I have been doing this now for months on my Mac OS 8.1 system. My OS 8 system came formatted to Extended (HFS+), but I didn't like that I couldn't run Norton utilites off of my CD-ROM disk (7.5.x), so I backed up my files, reformatted the drive, and reinstalled my files. You could do the same.