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Provides: Disc defragmenting
Format: Download
Developer: Coirois Systems
Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v.10.4.11 or later, 400MHz PowerPC G4 or better or any Intel Mac, 512MB RAM
Price: $29.95 ($14.95 upgrade, feature limited demo available)
Availability: Now

iDefrag is an application for doing just what it says: defragmenting your Mac OS X hard drive. While many people argue as to whether the Mac OS X file system requires defragmentation, this would be the app to use if you’re on that side of the debate. With a clean interface that shows you exactly what’s going on, iDefrag is great at what it does. If you don’t know what defragmenting a hard drive is, you should know that (at a high level) it’s basically moving around all of the random bits of data stored all over the hard drive into more condensed, larger blocks. This gives your disk more continuous amounts of free space.

When you launch iDefrag to start the defragmentation process, you first must authenticate and choose the disk you wish to defragment. If your target disk is also your main system disk, iDefrag will alert you informing you that you must restart to a mode where iDefrag can have complete control of the disk as it moves all of your files around quite a bit. This can be done through iDefrag itself and causes your machine to boot into a mode where the menu bar is only that of iDefrag and iDefrag is the only application running.

To begin the defragment process with iDefrag, you simply choose “Go” from it’s menu bar and let it take over. Before you do this, though, you should choose the type of defragmenting you want to do. Your options include compact, metadata, optimize, quick (on-line), or full defrag. The type you choose will affect how long the process takes and, obviously, what it does. Using a full defrag on a relatively new Mac OS X install with not many files still took longer than an hour. That said, while this may seem long, iDefrag has to move a lot of files around.

The main interface of this application also allows you to see what’s going on in three separate ways. Using the layout view seen near the top of this post, iDefrag will show you how it is aligning the blocks (or data) on your hard drive on the top as well as where it’s getting them from on the bottom. Using the file view seen right about this paragraph, iDefrag will give you some more details about each file, consisting of, among other things, how many fragments it’s in and how large it is.

The stats view below gives you a higher level overview of the entire process that’s occurring on your disk.

Overall, I was surprised at how simple this application was to both use and understand what was going on. It provides a nice visual display of the steps it is taking, showing you what is happening to the bits of data around the hard drive. Furthermore, I know it works because it solved an issue I was having with Boot Camp Assistant not being able to partition a disk due to not having enough continuous free space. While Boot Camp recommended a reinstall of Mac OS X, a simply defragment worked.

If your system is running slow and you can’t really think of a reason as to why, defragmenting it can usually help. If you are going to do so on Mac OS X, I’d highly recommend this application to do so.