Not a good thing.

[bhursey]

Well my mac mini has been progressively getting slower over the past month. I thought it was software at first. So Sunday itw as still responding enough to back up the 247 Gigs of os data. As in documents music movies and what not. I already had my photo library external and with 2 other external backup locations.

So I go to burn the Lion install image that I got from the app store and it was taking forever. I went and looked at disk manager.. Uh ohh.. S.M.A.R.T data said failed, and the mac said to back up as much as I can and take to apple. So I now have orderd a new 1tb 2.5 hd to replace. Just wanted to share the moral of the story always have a backup or 2. I did and did not lose any data... So I would recommend you doing the same.

S.M.A.R.T indicated that I had 4911 reallocation block count. This means it saw 4911 bad blocks over time and put that data in spare space. So when the drive trys to access it at that location it has to find it in the spare location adding to seek time. So time to break out the putty knife once the hd comes in..

[OsmosisStudios]

As a fairly recent mac convert, from Windows; is there a mac equivalent to a "defrag"?

[bhursey]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

As a fairly recent mac convert, from Windows; is there a mac equivalent to a "defrag"?

Here ya go. Ya short story no you do not need to defrag hfs+ system. Just like any decent file system E zfs XT3 EXT4 HFS+ defraging is obsolete. Welcome to the non windows modern erra.

About disk optimization with Mac OS X

[Aboiement]

I thought Macs never had problems and were gods gift to computers??

[zona5101]

Originally Posted by Aboiement

I thought Macs never had problems and were gods gift to computers??

they are...but they are pagan gods and need to be fed once in a while...

[doctorjames]

well to be fair, it was the hard-drive, so that wasnt really apples fault was it...? :P

[Jim Bryant]

Try DiskToolPro for Mac.

..........

[bhursey]

Originally Posted by doctorjames

well to be fair, it was the hard-drive, so that wasnt really apples fault was it...? :P

No its a Hitachi HD.. So not made by apple.

Here is my possible backup scheme. The off site crashplan backup may be over kill. Having my usb drive I carry with me every where may be enough. I am a Unix engineer with EMC Corp so I sorta have the mind set to have a fool proof backup. I do however have limited resources $ hence the 500 gig drives because I already have them.

[doctorjames]

The offsite backup is definitely not overkill.