Does Mac have a disk cleanup?

Question

PC's had disk defragmenter. Does Mac have anything similar to "clean up" the disks on the hard drive?

Answer 1

these articles are interesting about the fragmentation problem. i had some years ago that osx has software the limits fragmentation. however, in my experience, fragmentation still happens. take my powermac, please (an old joke)... my powermac is a bit over 2 years old. i have never filled the disk more than about 1/2 way. in recent months, the fragmentation is so bad that the disk makes popcorn even when booting... i am now trying to decide about how best to defrag... either run techtoolpro or drive genius or just reformat and reinstall...
on my powerbook at home, my hard drive died last fall. after i had a new hard disk installed, partitioned and installed the os, and restored all the files, my powerbook G4 is running circles around my dual powermac G5... personally i find partitioning the hard drive to be helpful at reducing the fragmentation. i believe it is because the swap, which stays on the root volume with the operating system dynamically grows a lot. and since it is always change size, it affects where the data files get written. with the virtual memory file on the partition with the OS files, which are changing that much, then the data files on the other partition don't also get scrambled so much... at least that is my current working theory... i used to do sysadmin work on unix systems about 15 years ago. we always formatted the disks in at least 3 partition, 1- for OS files, 2- data files, 3- scratch space for all the temp files that change dynamically... with that scheme, our suns would run for years and have very little performance slowdowns...
when i got my powermac and had heard that fragmentation was addressed in osx, i thought i'd try it with a single partition. now i regret it... it is more work to partition and it can be a lot of work if one has to change the partition (though i've read that 10.5 doesn't make one reformat, which i don't understand how that works...), but i've found that it makes less maintenance...
one of the advantages of a reformat and new install is that it clears out all the miscellaneous files that get installed with programs over the years. but it is a lot of work to reinstall all the applications... so the reformat option has it's pluses and minuses... the downside to the utility software is that it can take forever and a day, especially if the fragmentation is bad... last night i stuck around work til about 9pm waiting for techtoolpro to finish it's "diagnostic check"... it was running for about 4 hours before i gave up and came home...
i hadn't heard about iDefrag... but i already have techtoolpro and drive genius, though i haven't used either much before... i wonder if one is better than the other...