Does defragmenting game files through Steam have any effect when using it over Crossover Games on Mac OS X? Is it worth defragmenting once in a while?
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Does defragmenting game files through Steam have any effect when using it over Crossover Games on Mac OS X? Is it worth defragmenting once in a while?
There's probably no point. Mac OS X, Vista, and the ext3 filesystem do defragmenting automatically in the background all the time now.
Actually I think the defragmentation in Steam doesn't do the same as Windows' defrag does. The Steam data files can have internal fragmentation. They are a sort of file system image or compressed file(simmilar to .zip) which can be fragmented internally as parts of it are updated regularly.
The defrag does something and takes a while. I have never had more than 2-3% fragmentation myself, so I did not see a performance boost, but I didn't expect one really.
Balfour is only partially right on the ext3 defrag. ext2 and 3 have some algorithms to prevent fragmentation from happening in many situations, although obviously it cannot be completely prevented. There is no working defrag software for ext3. The only way is to copy the files away, reformat and copy them back.
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