He’s Just Had Coffee

If you’re like me and you run your hard drive on your Mac close to capacity a lot, and you’ve been getting really slow response with a lot of disk thrashing - then ignore all those people who say the HFS+ filesystem never needs to be defragged.

• Make a bootable backup of your hard drive using command line tools or shiny programs like SuperDuper or Déjà Vu, just in case something goes wrong.

• Get a good defrag program that understands how HFS+ works (everyone I’ve read says iDefrag, which is what I used)

• set aside an overnight for a full defrag and let it rip. I booted from my bootable backup just to make sure it worked, then defragged the internal drive from there.

• reboot from the main drive, sit back and revel in how little noise the disk now makes and how fast your machine is again.

There’s lots of maintenance tips and tune-up software recommendations in this fine article. I also installed SMARTreporter which allegedly sits in my menu bar and goes red when my internal drive is about to fail - giving me time for a last backup.

Seriously, it’s like it’s new.

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