At 1:20 AM -0600 1/6/2010, David Colvin wrote:
I initialize the hard drive on my iBook about twice a year. I just love that "zippy" new computer feel after a good scrubbing.

Reformatting a running drive shouldn't be necessary and is not advised. Reformatting involves blowing away the soft bad-block map (the hard, aka manufacturer's, map is retained). That leaves you with a file system that will potentially use marginal blocks for your data.

The performance improvement, with the classic Mac OS, comes from the out-and-back defrag. Backup, initialize the drive, reload it - the files are put on contiguously. Unnecessary under OS X, as the same performance improvement there comes from running simple maintenance tasks. OS X does the important defragging automatically.

- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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