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One of the really nice things about Mac OS X is that you don’t need to defrag your hard drives — the operating system does it for you and it just works. However, there is a caveat here and that is your Mac doesn’t defrag files that are 20MB or larger, which could be a problem vis-a-vis games.

If you play Steam games, Valve’s built a defragger into their game portal software to get that job done. Thereupon, Kevin Etter has the news on the why of game file defragging in Mac OS X on his SkyFirex blog:

“Mac OS X users have not needed the ability to defragment their hard drives. Most defragging is done in the background by the OS. There is one caveat: OS X does not defragment files larger than 20 MB. Quite often, many game files are easily larger than 20 MB. Fragmentation of game files will negatively impact performance of games, particularly FPS games.

Thereupon, fire up Steam, go to your Library, click on list view (upper right) and then right click (Control + click) on the game you want to defrag. From the resulting pop up, select Properties, click the Local Files tab, click Defragment Cache Files and then go do something else for awhile (i.e. make a sandwich, get a fresh cup).

Whereas defragging game files to improve performance, because Mac OS X doesn’t, seems to make sense, I’d like to see some benchmarks that back up this conclusion…

What’s your take?

via Mac OS X Hints