Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!jwhitnell
From: jwhitnell@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: question about disk compaction
Message-ID: <5766@cup.portal.com>
Date: 22 May 88 18:49:15 GMT
References: <32435@linus.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.3098

Thomas J. Brando writes...
|Two questions:  (1) will compacting my hard disk do me any good,

The answer is maybe.  One of the nice things about the Mac is that it
is much smarter about allocating disk space on large volumes then is
MS DOS.  The algorithm the Mac uses leads to less fragementation and
hence less performance loss.  Only with very large files (such as System)
will there ususally be fragmentation (unless disk space is very tight)

|and (2) how can I do it?

There are two commerical utilities (with something as important as my disk
I would never use a shareware/public domain utility) that I know of,
DiskExpress by AlSoft ($34 from ComputerWare) and PowerOP V1.3 by PowerUP
(sp?) (no price listed but same range).  PowerOp offers a slightly better
user interface in that it tells you what files are fragmented and allows
you to exclude some of them, whereas DiskExpress will do your whole disk only.
PowerOp is also by far the faster of the two.  However PowerOp had serious
problems rearranging some of the larger files on my disk, so I can't
really recommend it.  DiskExpress had no such problems with the same disk.
Both offer erase free space (either 1 pass for speed or 3 passes for
complete security) and a low-level disk scan to check the disk.  Neither
offered significant performance improvments after running either on my
disk.  Your milage may differ.

DiskExpress also compresses all the files towards sector 0 sorted with
either applications followed by documents or vice versus, whereas PowerOp
just moves fragmented files

The feature neither has and what I think will speed things up for any
hard disk user to the ability to move the commonly used things to the
beginning of the disk (i.e. directory followed by common files followed
by free  space followed by rarly used files).  Anyone want to write one?

|Thom Brando              linus!brando@mitre-bedford.{arpa,bitnet,csnet}

Jerry Whitnell
jwhitnell@cup.portal.com
..!sun!cup.portal.com!jwhitnell