iDefrag your Mac

There is an urban myth that Macs don't need to be defragged because OS X "takes care of it for you" -- well, that's true for FILE fragmentation but not for FREE SPACE fragmentation. I have an iMac G5 (PowerPC) with a 160GB hard drive that I've filled up then freed up some space on several times over the years, so I figured it must be rather fragmented. So I bought iDefrag from Coriolis Systems (on faith and good reviews alone) and sure enough it consolidated my 37,000 fragments of free space into just 4 -- one of which was 48GB of contiguous free space at the end of the drive plus 3 other tiny ones near the front (not sure why).

Here are the BEFORE and AFTER screen shots (literally pictures of the screen taken with my Blackberry, since iDefrag only offer full optimization functionality when run from another drive or their boot disc -- which is what I used):


This process took several hours (I should have timed it), including a little break where iDefrag gives the hard drive a chance to cool down since it monitors the drive's temperature sensor. I also should have timed my boot time before and after but I forgot to do that. I'll see whether it saves me any time on my whole-disk backup (using SuperDuper!) too.