The lie that is “It Just works!” has struck again. No disk defrag utilities are shipped with OSX because, you know, the Mac OS is brilliant enough to perform its own optimizations in such a way that you don’t have to defrag. Why should the user ever need to manually do such a thing? It’s a Mac… it just works!!!
BULLSHIT.
I need to defrag my hard drive and I don’t want to pay for some 3rd party software when it should be included as a utility, as it is in Windows. I currently have about 80gb of free space and I’m trying to create a rather modestly sized 32gb partition for windows using boot camp. The error message I get is that there are some files which cannot be moved. Which files are these? The oh so minimalist stylish error message could not be bothered to point them out. Googling pointed out that this might be a fragmentation problem. I tried to manually partition the drive using their disk utility as sort of a forced “clear out this continuous block of space for me.” This time, the error message was “Not enough space.” Right. Not enough space in 80gb of free space for a 32gb partition?? REALLY? Wouldn’t you think that the OS would be smart enough to realize that 80 is greater than 32 and that maybe it’s time to do some of that so called built in “optimization” that makes defragmentation unnecessary?? Why doesn’t it just work like that?
Do you know what the official apple page says about what to do if you think you need to defrag? They suggest, and I paraphrase, 1. Reboot. 2. Make a backup of your hard drive and REINSTALL the OS. 3. Use a 3rd party tool.
I’d say that I’ve dualbooted and partitioned many a machine/hard drive on Linux and in Windows, and in the past, on this Mac. Never before have I encountered such a mind-numbingly stupid and completely avoidable situation.
On a related note – if you can think of another solution that doesn’t involve backing up everything and reinstalling, please let me know.