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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Mac Disk Maintenance...any Suggestions?
Chris Mackler, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Athens | OH | USA | Posted: 12:15 AM on 10.11.05 |
| ->> I've just recently filled up my powerbook's 70-something Gig hard drive with my photos and am in the process of moving most of my files off onto a Lacie. In the process of doing this, my mac has become super slow, the spinning wheel of death popping up all the time. I definitely need to get more memory, but that aside, does anybody know of any good disk maintenance / defragger programs out there? How does everyone deal with this problem? I'm thinking I've surpassed apple's built-in Disk Utility, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! |
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Chris Preovolos, Photographer
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Stamford | CT | United States | Posted: 12:35 AM on 10.11.05 |
->> TechTool Pro 4 is good:
http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html
as is DiskWarrior:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
I use both. TT does a whole bunch of different things, while DiskWarrior basically just rebuilds the disc's directory structure. TT does this too, but I have experienced disc problems that TT could not fix and DiskWarrior could. In other words, get both. |
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Robert Irvin, Photographer
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Bruce Twitchell, Photographer
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Coeur d'Alene | ID | USA | Posted: 12:59 AM on 10.11.05 |
->> Open up the application Disk Utility that is located in your applications---->utilities folder.
Run the 'Repair Disk Permissions" located under Disk First Aid. That will help speed things up. |
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Dave Yoder, Photographer
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Milan | IT | Italy | Posted: 2:59 AM on 10.11.05 |
->> If you literally filled up the HD that would probably explain the slowness, as I believe OSX likes to use the drive a lot. I think you need to always leave a few gigs free for the system to use.
And I hope hope hope you are backing up... hard drives are about the most insecure way to store photos. I've already had one laptop HD fail on me. Also, Lacie drives usually have the cheapish Maxtor drives in them, which I always seem to hear are the worst. I buy Seagate drives (the ones with the 5-year warranties) and my own housing to install them into. |
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Joshua Brown, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Salt Lake City | UT | USA | Posted: 5:04 AM on 10.11.05 |
->> This is the program I use to keep everything running smooth:
http://www.macosxcocktail.com |
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Bryan Rinnert, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Columbus | OH | United States | Posted: 8:40 AM on 10.11.05 |
->> Another way to run the Disk Utility on the start up disk, without another disk it to start up in command line.
Hold on Apple - S while restarting, you will get a command line interface (a little scary for us photographers I know) Then (per instructions from Apple):
At the command-line prompt, type: /sbin/fsck -fy
Press Return.
The fsck utility will go through five "phases" then return information about the disk's utilization and fragmentation. Once the check is finished, if no issue is found, you should see "** The volume (name of volume) appears to be OK."
If fsck alters, repairs, or fixes anything, it will display the message:
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
Important: If this message appears, repeat the fsck command until it no longer appears. It's OK if you need to do several "passes" of fsck, because first-pass repairs may uncover additional issues.
When fsck reports that, "** The volume (name of volume) appears to be OK.", type: reboot
Press Return.
You can also read more about doing this here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
I've used it several times and works well.
I also use a small program called iDefrag once every 6 months or so. It takes a while and you have to start up from another drive, but it speeds up performance quite a bit. I normally let it run over night. Make sure you run a disk repair program of some sort before running any kind of defrag program, defrag programs can make problems worse if there is already something wrong with the disk. |
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George Bridges, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Washington | DC | USA | Posted: 8:55 AM on 10.11.05 |
->> A great thing about OSX is it will run various utilites on itself automatically.
The bad thing is to avoid interferring with your work it is set to run late at night, which if your computer is shut down or the hard drive goes to sleep then it never runs -- like the way most PowerBooks are handled. If you have a desktop it's okay to leave it on all the time and set the hard drive to never go to sleep, this way the computer will wake up and run those scripts as it needs and spin down when nothing else is happening.
Programs like Cocktail, as mentioned, and Macaroni will run all of these scripits for you at a time you determine. This does things like repair permissions, clean out old caches and logs which helps your system run smoother and be more stable.
Also, OSX does not require defragment as much as older Macs or Windows machines, but if you had a bunch of big files such as photos on the machine and moved them off then it may be a good idea to run a defrag program.
TechTools has a lot of features that helf. DiskWarrior is really good -- when you have a major problem. It can be run on a regular basis but many people reserve it for when the computer seems to be fried. |
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Ron Scheffler, Photographer
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Hamilton (Toronto area) | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 1:58 PM on 10.11.05 |
->> Chris, if the disk is almost full and you don't have much RAM installed, there will be considerable slow downs as the computer relies more on memory written to the disk rather than RAM. This slows down the computer even more if the free space on the disk is highly fragmented and the computer needs to spend more time to find that space. From what I have noticed, OSX already likes to use a lot of virtual memory, even if you have a stack of RAM, so keeping some space free on the drive will help a lot. As you probably know, applications like Photoshop and Photo Mechanic make extensive use of scratch disk storage which will also cause slowdowns. At least with those two apps, you can also assign the preferred scratch disk location.
Since you can only install one drive in a PB, the only non-external solution to take advantage of the scratch disk allocation option is to partition your disk into separate areas for the OS, scratch, and the files (but partitioning does mean reformatting the entire drive). By doing this, I believe you give your computer some breathing room. There are a lot of apps (if not all) that will run virutal memory and/or store some sort of temporary files to disk that can't be assigned to a specific location (such as Canon's DPP raw converter, which if you use to convert hundreds of files in one sitting, can balloon into several GBs of virtual memory) and therefore will always use the start up disk/volume. So, to take this into account, you want to leave at least 5-10GB of space in addition to all of the OS files for the OS partition. For the scratch partition, I arbitrarily decided on 10GB, and the rest is left for file storage such as photos and music on a third partition. You might want to consider moving your iTunes music folder, as well as your Picutres folder, out of your home folder if they contain a lot of files. With the OS partition you also want to keep in mind future OS upgrades. For example, going from Panther to Tiger, I noticed that OS related disk usage on my computer went from around 8GB to about 15GB and now sits at 18GB (I suppose that also depends on how many apps you have installed). I can only imagine that the next version will require even more space.
If you are already planning to copy over most of your files, I would suggest you consider cloning your entire PB drive onto the external drive. You can use Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner (it's freeware), then copy back just the OS related folders after you've partitioned the PB drive. By cloning over the entire PB drive, you also have the benefit of having a bootable copy of your entire system should something go funny on the PB drive. By restoring from the clone, it's much less time consuming than reinstalling from the Apple install discs, and you keep all of your user settings. You could also partition the external drive into several volumes and every couple weeks clone your PB to the next available volume as a form of crude incremental backup. This is something I would definitely recommend with a laptop. Since it is portable, the chances it will experience a fatal drop or even worse, be stolen, are greater than with a tower. Even more reason to back up your work more frequently.
If you are running Tiger, another thing to keep in mind is Spotlight. If you do decided to assign a specific scratch disk area other than the default setting, you need to include that in the Spotlight privacy folder, otherwise Spotlight will spend a ton of time indexing temporary files.
As others have suggested, it would be a good idea to invest in Disk Warrior and run it from time to time to prevent problems with the directory. I am by no means a computer expert, but have spent enough time fixing problems on my Macs to have noticed that virtually all of them were directory related issues rather than hardware problems. The only thing that Disk Warrior does is fix directories, but it seems to do a really good job at that.
I realize my post is probably getting a bit off topic from your original question, but I hope you will consider some of these options and find the information helpful. |
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Vasha Hunt, Photographer
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Opelika | AL | USA | Posted: 3:06 PM on 10.11.05 |
->> If you are running Tiger, be sure to get the latest Techtools - 4.0.4 (the .4 is key) as 4.0.3 and earlier is not Tiger-friendly. In addition to Cocktail and Macaroni is a free utillity called Mac Janitor. Here is a snip from the webpage of the utillity (which echoes George Bridges comment):
MacJanitor is designed to be used on a periodic basis by Mac OS X users who don't leave their computer on (and awake) 24 hours a day. MacJanitor is provided as freeware as a service to laptop and energy-conscious home users.
The Unix subsystems on Mac OS X were originally written for machines that were typically never shut off. Mac OS X inherits this assumption in version 1.x, and has many system maintenance tasks that are scheduled to run between 3 am and 5 am. In addition, there are scripts designed to run weekly on weekends, and once a month in the middle of the night.
If these maintenance tasks are never run (such as on a laptop that is always shut off at night), many log files and system database will grow extremely large or fail to get backed up.
MacJanitor provides a way to run these system tasks at the click of a button. Laptop users could click the 'daily' button every morning (or every few days), or office workers could click the 'weekly' button on Mondays.
Here is the web adress: http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html
I use it every day, it is fairly quick and easy.
Also, as Dave Yoder was saying, maxing out your harddrive will really slow down OS X. The number I read somewhere is ideally not filling over 75% of your drive. On an 80 gig drive that means keeping 20 gigs free. Of course I disoby that from time to time, but when you have that kind of room on the drive, it does perform a bunch better.
And, in case everyone hasn't heard, retailers are now shipping a 120 gig notebook drive at 5400 rpm, and if you really want speed, a 100 gig 7200 rpm drive (which is next on my list).
Vasha |
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