How to defrag HDD on Lion OSX?

the best and free way to defrag a harddrive is to clone to an external drive using CCC, boot the clone, WIPE THE INTERNAL, and then clone it back, which does the same thing and is not as disruptive (inmo).

Message was edited by: coocooforcocoapuffs: forgot a step: WIPE THE INTERNAL

OSX volumes rarely, if ever, need defragging.

OSX does it automatically, for files under 20 MB.

See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375 and this from the Help Center:

Come on guys... I used iDefrag in Leopard and the content of the HDD was scattered like ****...

After 6 months of using the system the hard disk was so fragmented that spotlight did not finish ever indexing and I had permanent hdd activity which was killing the system...

After a 7-8 hours of full optimization with iDisk everything was normal again. Since then I used iDisk every 2 weeks ... (the problem is that it is not working with Lion now) ... these Linux and OS X stories about no defrag are real childish..

Did you check for an update? They just released a new iDefrag update in the last few days or so and it's supposed to support Lion.

I haven't tested it yet because I'm too scared to update to Lion yet. I've downloaded it, backed everything up, and cleaned my whole system (including a fresh SL install), but I just can't seem to get up the nerve to move to Lion yet. The only thing I want about Lion is the new Mail.app, everything else is a huge step backwards as far as I can tell. They worked really hard to overcomplicate the interface on this one!

oops, my mistake, I was thinking of SuperDuper that just updated for Lion. I guess there's another reason to wait. And I was actually thinking of trying it out tonight. Guess not.

After 6 months of using the system the hard disk was so fragmented that spotlight did not finish ever indexing and I had permanent hdd activity which was killing the system...

Perhaps you had some other issues. The last time I did a defrag was in OS9, and I have never had any issues with a slow system since, even after perhaps 18 months constant use (probably usual time before I do some sort of major update).

You might find https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1704179?answerId=8074758022#8074758022 interesting...

...I did 🙂

Have fun

Adrian

The programs that are most commonly used to edit large files over 20mb that aren't handled by automatic OS X housekeeping generally have preferences that allow you to direct them to chew on disk space within the confines of a scratch partition rather than the partition where your system and apps reside. If your HD is in true need of defragging that often you are losing system and app speed unnecessarily. It would be worth your while to find out what programs' files are responsible for the serious disk fragmentation you are seeing and direct their thuggish habits to a separate partition.