Re: Focus drive on 2e

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

"John King" <joki@eskimo.com> wrote:

>Is disk fragmentation an issue?
>
>Does ProDos take care of that like Linux does?

ProDOS can get fragmented over time.  The only solution is either
to use a defragmentation program like ProSel 8 (free for download;
legal freeware on the ftp://ground.ecn.uiowa.edu/apple8/ ground
ftp server) or copy all your files to floppy, reformat the Focus,
then copy all the files back.

What I would recommend is that you leave one partition empty.
When you want to defragment, copy all your files from the
partition you want to defragment to this empty partition.
Reformat the partition you want to defragment.  Copy all the
files back to the reformatted partition.  Finally, reformat the
temporary partition so it is again empty.

Do this once every three months and you should have a nice
unfragmented hard drive with no speed penalties.

ProDOS does tend to slow down when it gets fragmented and
having the read/write heads thrashing about too much is not
good for the longevity of the drive so defragmenting is a good
idea.