I booted with the OS 9.1 G$ PowerBook CD (The only CD I have that boots my iMac into Classic) and formatted the drive and selected "zero all data" and waited and waited.....*6 months later* and waiting and waiting. j/k It took about 3 hours or so.

So the hard disk is 100% zeroes and I installed Classic and OS X, and now my machine is a speed demon, I can't believe how fast it is. I've never had it this fast.

I just got my second wind.

The Lightning Stalker

Performa 631CD, 7.5.5
LC III Mail Server
Q610
Q650

6400/180 40/1.6G/512k L2/enet/video-in/TV
7600/120 '604/233, 80/1.2G & 4G, 9.2.2
Beige G3/266 ATX Tower

You will notice a speed bump though, it's faster. Although you can defrag a hard disk, I don't like to as the last time I did, it corrupted my Quake 3 Install..so I was worried about other files as well.

There is an article online as well how you can hack Mac OS X to use a dedicated swap partition as well which increases speed as well since the partition is located on the outer disk tracks and never changes. (Outer disc tracks are larger in size, hence one revolution can provide more access to data then the inner circles of the drive which require more spins to locate data due to narrowing size of the plates) This hack also reduces fragmentation of the swap files.

I'm not sure how fast panther'll go though, so I might have to end up putting Jaggie back on there

The reason for the improved performance is that a clean installation on a reformatted drive puts all the files -- in particular, often-accessed System-related files -- in one place, at the "beginning" of the hard drive. This increases performance (a) because the files are closest to the drive head, and (b) because the files are all close to each other.

So what you've really done is defragment the drive, and the files on it.

You can accomplish the same thing by using a defragger, or more simply by doing a regular, two-second reformat followed by a reinstall of the OS. In fact, to make it even quicker, you can copy the existing System Folder to another HD, reformat the primary HD, and then just copy the System Folder back onto the primary HD. All the files will now be defragmented and clustered together.

M

No rank

Y'all are talking about defrag programs, but what defrag program even exists for MacOS and MacOS X? I have heard and seen of none that are free, like MS' defrag program with windows.

Norton: "You say we did a poor job defragging your system?"

Bruce Willis: "No, I said you did a piss poor job. You got your engine all backwards. Let me guess your corrupting data and can't figure out why? That's because your brains are all wrong Mr. Wizard."

;-) Like I said, it's a piss poor job of defraging.

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