[Hidden-tech] Need quick advice on Mac OS 10.2.8, please

[David Haines]

On Apr 6, 2007, at 10:07 AM, Charlton Wilbur wrote:

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> On Apr 5, 2007, at 5:48 PM, Shel Horowitz wrote:
>
>> 1. How does one defrag a hard drive in OS 10.2.8? I knew how to do  
>> it in OS 1-9 but I don't know how with my current system.  
>> Performance has gotten really slow the last couple of weeks, and I  
>> suspect fragmentation. (Or is there something else I should be  
>> doing to restore performance speed?). It has used 34.65GB out of  
>> 55.89.
>
> Apple's HFS+ doesn't suffer from fragmentation in the same way that  
> Microsoft's FAT32 and NTFS file systems do, and OS X takes great  
> pains to keep files smaller than a fairly large size (20MB?  I  
> don't remember the number precisely) contiguous on disk at all  
> times.  Odds are that something else is wrong.
>
>> 2. Twice this week, I have been unable to wake up this Mac when  
>> it's asleep. Both times it was several hours into a massive file  
>> upload using YouSendIt (today's was ~680MB, and it got up to 30%  
>> within a couple of hours, then just sat there, and then when I  
>> came back an hour after I'd last used it, no matter what I did, I  
>> got a dark screen with only the power light on). I don't know if a  
>> similar problem had occurred the previous time, but I *was* in the  
>> middle of an upload.
>
> If it doesn't happen any other time, I'd suspect YouSendIt.  If it  
> happens with other programs too, I'd recommend checking to see if  
> there's a firmware upgrade for your machine, and considering an  
> upgrade to 10.3 or 10.4 -- power management has improved  
> considerably since 10.2.

Please keep in mind that the de-fragmentation features of Mac OS X  
were introduced as of 10.3 and so this is a moot point for Shel's  
machine running 10.2.8.

The de-fragmention mentioned (again, true only for 10.3 onward)  
involves two mechanisms:

1) "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering," in which the most actively used  
files are moved to more efficient sectors of the Hard Drive (NTFS  
does something similar) over time,

and

2) de-fragmentation of files on the fly: when a file is accessed and  
is 20MB or smaller, and the file is fragmented.


As for the wake-from-sleep issue: it could be an issue with an  
attached device (USB). With a symptom like this, "zapping" (or  
resetting) the PRAM is probably a good idea. While this step is  
really & truly not a panacea, there are times when it can do some  
good. If the issue persists, you might be seeing symptoms of a  
hardware problem (PMU).


David Haines,
Core Solution Group
ACDT, ACPT, ACTC