How to defrag my macbook ?

You don't really need to defrag a mac. Here's an Apple article to read. If you do want to defrag, you can use an application like iDefrag, or you can clone your drive to an external disk using SuperDuper, then erase your internal disk, and clone back which will effectively defrag your disk.

I'm considering a back-to-back cloning of my hard drive to "defrag" it. Should I erase the target volume first and then clone? I use Carbon Copy Cloner and it warns me that it will erase everything on my target volume first. Does this accomplish erasing the target volume as you suggest?

My TiBook is 4 years old, the hard drive is 80% full, and I get an awful lot of spinning beach balls and hanging apps. For instance, Firefox takes up to 27 seconds to open, and the same to close. The entire system is running v e r r y s l o w l y.

But it runs noticeably faster on my bootable clone external hard drive, which I believe has the same 5400 rpm speed as my internal drive (connected with a Firewire 400 cable). I was told that cloning the TiBook hard drive from the bootable clone will effectively accomplish a reinstall of the OS.

Hans Fastolfe:

In the future, please create a new topic in the appropriate forum so we can keep threads clear!

As for your question, I have one of my own--have you ever replaced the hard drive in this computer? If not, the aging hard drive could be the root of your issues and reformatting it won't help any. Considering that the computer runs well from an external drive suggests to me that the internal may be on its last legs.

It is certainly worth erasing and cloning to see if anything changes; if not, it's probably time for a new hard drive.

~Lyssa