reesesWeb

After yesterday's reminder why I am glad I am not in operations or a CIO, I was a little nervous booting up this morning. I left the Mac off all last night in the hope that nothing else would break, ignoring the fact that most light bulbs burn out when you turn them on.

Booting up this morning (from the external drive), the internal drive made a few clunky noises at first, then no more sound. It's mounted, I can view files on it (and make sure I had copied off the important ones that I didn't have backed up already), and has been running like a champ. I'm guessing it has a Mean-Uptime-Between-Failures problem of about a week, and since I've been home, I haven't been powering it down as often. Score one for having to put it to sleep every Monday and Thursday.

Anyway, when I booted up this morning, the machine was fast. Like, I-take-back-every-bad-thing-I-ever-said-about-you-my-poor-baby-Mac fast. I thought,"Wow, the drive must have been so sick that it was slowing everything down, and not even Firewire 400 can slow the external drive down so much that it's as slow as it used to be!"

Then one thing occurred to me, and I learned another, that shed some bright light on the subject.

1)

I bought the Mac with the "biggest, fastest" drive option when I ordered it. That was one of the many overpriced CTO options that made this laptop so expensive over two years ago. However, "fastest" at that time meant 5400rpm, not 7200rpm as the external Firewire drive is. D'oh.

2)

The other, and this is more offensive, is that Apple tells people that they don't need to defragment their drives because they use what's called "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering", which automatically defragments fragmented files when it accesses them.

Except, guess what, it only does that if they're smaller than 20MB. So, basically, they defragment the tiny files that might span a few blocks, and that's nice, but in this day and age, I have scads of files in the 20-100MB range. I downloaded iDefrag because it was the first Google result, and it showed me that my internal drive (still running quietly and happily, by the way) is roughly 75% fragmented. This is after preparing to send the drive to AppleCare by deleting all the "personal files" (like those videos of me reflected, naked, in a teapot) which were probably fragmented as well.

On the bright side, the new PowerBook I ordered will have a 7200rpm internal drive, faster CPU (but only 33% faster), and DDR RAM, so it should seem positively blistering.

And yes, it will be defragmented regularly.

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