Mac Switcher

Microsoft Windows always comes with a disk defragmentation software, but Mac OS X does not has such tool by default. According to Apple, Mac OS X does not need defragment. Is it truth? I bought iDefrag, an OS X defrag tool, and here is my review.

Description: Advanced Mac OS X disk defragmentation and optimization. Supports the very latest features of HFS+, including journaling, case sensitive filenames and adaptive hot file clustering (which means it won’t mess-up the Hot Zone). Ranked 5 stars on VersionTracker.

Price: USD32.00

iDefrag homepage

Buy and Download iDefrag

I spent USD32.00 ($17.50 pound) to purchase iDefrag by PayPal funds. Once paid, you may download the software immediately from the website. A login user id and password will be given.

Though I purchased iDefrag only, but I get three software downloads on the software download page. Beside iDefrag, there are Coriolis CDMaker and iDefrag Beta. I recommend you to download both iDefrag (not beta) and CDMaker. The CDMaker will be used to create a Mac OS X bootable CD with iDefrag, so that you can run full defragmentation on startup disk.

iDefrag - First Impression

The user interface of iDefrag is simple and clear. Not many controls. Simply select the target disk and choose the defragment algorithm. The algorithms are: Compact, Metadata, Optimize, Quick(on-line), and Full Defrag. However, Mac OS X startup disk can only use Quick algorithm. Other algorithms are active only if you are booting from other partition, external disk or a iDefrag bootable CD. There we need the Coriolis CDMaker.

Coriolis CDMaker - Creating iDefrag Bootable CD

For the first launch, Coriolis CDMaker will try to get Mac OS X bootable CD template(some Mac OS X core files). It can download the files from Internet but the download size is over 100MB!

So, I recommend you to insert Mac OS X Installation Disk 1 and CDMaker will detect the source and copy the files needed. Fast and Easy.

After copied bootable CD template, CDMaker will burn a OS X bootable CD with iDefrag. Then, you may use the disk to start up your Mac(press “C” during bootup) and run iDefrag in full mode.

iDefrag perfomance?

It took a few hours for full defragmentation for my iBook 40GB hard disk. After that, the Mac startup takes shorter time. Spotlight search is faster. Applications launching speed also improved.

I am very satisfied! Highly recommended for power Mac users!

Technorati Tags: coriolis, defrag, defragmentation, disk, idefrag, mac, optimize, osx

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Reviews, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.