Mac Forum / Applications / Other MS Products / December 2007

How did you do defragment on your mac?
We usually just use the disk utility and repair.  You could also erase your
free space if you like, but degragmenting is done automatically on the fly
with OS 10.

christina

Don't be concerned:-)

The figures you see are "approximate" at best & some are downright
misleading.

First of all the real capacity of the drive is *never* as high as the
nominal designation suggests because of manufcturing variable and formatting
requirements - I have a "160 GB" that only formats to 154 GB usable.

Second, of what is physically available the OS "reserves" a certain portion
for virtual memory & swap disk space, so that isn't actually available to
the user.

Finally, there isn't a hard drive in the world that *doesn't* have bad
sectors - this relates back to my first point. It's simply the nture of the
beast. In fact, if you only have 16K worth you're darned lucky:-) That's a
part of the OS' responsibility when the drive is formatted - to recognize
the bad areas & flag them so it doesn't attempt to write to them later.

I found a neat software called iPartition, that is really helpful with
checking hard drive space.  It also allows you to resize partitions to fill
your space.  However you must have a partition for swap, and that will take
away from the actual size of your main drives.

christina