What disk utility to optimize Mac performance?

[robert goldstein]

Photoshop CS is getting ever slower on my Mac, and I suspect that the hard drive is badly fragmented

and in need of optimization. Unfortunately, I do not have the Mac OS X install CD, so I cannot use the

Apple Disk Utility for this purpose.

 

What is the best utility for the job? I am running OS 10.3.9 on a G4 Dual with 2Gb

RAM.

[aeiffel]

You've to boot from a different partition and run something like iDefrag on your system disk.

[joe tarrant]

Make and burn an OS X bootdisk to CDROM. Make sure it includes the Disk Util. Boot from

that and see if you can fix your problem.

[gdanmitchell]

How full is your hard drive? Photoshop makes extensive use of a disk cache and if you only

have a few gigs left your system will slow down considerably.

 

If you have multiple drives you can tell Photoshop to use the least full drive for its scratch

space.

[will_hammond]

Robert,

 

I can highly recommend AppleJack (which was recommended to me by one of my

students). It is for the most part a command line editer for singele user mode but is very

easy to use. You can download it here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/

macosx/19596

 

It will clean up cache files, repair disks, repair permissions, clean up virtual memory files

etc. The improvement to my system has been stunning and best of all it's free. I would

use the "deep clean" mode first. BTW, defrag on OSX is a complete waste of time as OSX by

it's very nature is a fragmented system ( based on it's Unix underpinnings), scratch disks

are another matter. This has also been discussed at length in this forum.

 

Regards,

 

Will

 

Adobe CTI Photoshop

[mike sisk]

Actually, OS X includes many advanced features in the HFS+ filesystem including built-in

on-the-fly defragmentation, journaling, and hot file clustering.

 

And while HFS+ may appear to be unix-based on the surface, it's actually nothing like the

typical unix filesystem -- it's quite complicated and rather advanced. HFS+ is actually

more like Window's NTFS than unix filesystems like ext or ufs.

 

BTW, in case someone asks, more than you ever wanted to know about OS X's geeky

details (including all the filesystem stuff above) can be found in Amit Singh's excellent and

very thick tome "Mac OS X Internals".

[patricklavoie]

Add more memmory to your Mac that way Photoshop will use less hard drive, Upgrade your system to 10.4.8 to get more stability, then / or use Disk Genius (one of the best tools for that purpose and many more to save your a**) If you can, add another internal hard drive, and use them as a stripped RAID...you will gain marvellous speed...at a price; if you dont backup your stuff regularly, if 1 drive get faulty, you lose everything...pretty bad. But i can say that on my MacPro it took before a 1min someting to uncompress a 1gig file, now in RAID it took less than 30sec. pretty fast setup.

[will_hammond]

Mike,

 

Actually, HFS+ and the operating system are to totally different stories. I made no mention of HFS+ as Hierarchal File System is a directory structure (aka. drive format)and was around long before OSX. Mac OSX (based on Berkley Unix) has many, many redundant file features (part of its protected memory scheme) and system is what I was referring to. I think you and I talkng about different things.

 

At the Apple developers conference a few years ago we actually did a test with regard to fragmentation using both Photoshop and FinalCut Pro and after only about 2 hours of use the fragmentation was major.

 

BTW, I have read Amit Singh's reports on OSXbook.com. He kinds scares me, he knows WAY to much about code :-D

 

Regards,

 

Will

[robert goldstein]

Thanks to everyone. I will check into Apple Jack.

[aeiffel]

The most useful part in defragmentation apps on osx is the rearrangement of the various file types accros the system disk.<br>

With some tools you can create your own specific order or follow the osx guidelines, it'll depend on your needs. AFAIC I follow the standard scheme : catalog B-tree, metadata & cache, system files and librairies, apps, data.<br>

If I perform a lot of updates on my installed apps, I make sure to rebuild the cache then run a defragmentation app to rearrange the allocation based on the file types.