Mac harddrive maintenance?

[suppositron]

So I'm new to the mac world and wondering if you defragment a mac drive just like a pc or is all that automatically done by the OS? Is there a need to do this preventative maintenance on a mac? Using Leapord, all I see is an option to repair or repartition. Is a repair like defraging?

[John Jeffers]

There's no native defrag tool because (according to Apple) you should never need to defrag an HFS+ volume. Since you're new to Macs, I should probably explain that HFS+ is the default file system on a Mac. Theoretically, HFS+ should automatically keep disk fragmentation to a minimum. Here's one guy's detailed explanation of how HFS+ manages fragmentation. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, skip down to the bottom and read the conclusion.

If you want to defrag, there are 3rd party tools you can use. The most popular is iDefrag. Personally, I've never used it, but others swear by it.

[Professor T]

I use iDefrag, and never had any problems.

Of course you have to boot your computer from a disk other than the one you're defragging. But I just use it on my external hard drive.

[suppositron]

Haven't looked yet but i think my harddrive is formatted differently than HFS+. On top of that my external harddrive is FAT32 because I used it with windows so could I defrag that with iDefrag or would I have to use a pc? And if I use a pc will that mess up the files written with a mac?

[@?,*???&?]

Use Discwarrior for your hard drive needs. They say that in OS X you do not need to defragment as information is stored and accessed differently than OS 9. That said, a corrupt table of contents will destroy your ability to access anything on a drive. Use Discwarrior to keep that up to date.