Swapping the HDD on our Mac mini many (many) moons ago I put the new one in an external caddy, did the "restore to disc" or whatever it's called and put the thing in the machine. Instant big speedup - more than could be expected given that both were spinning rust. I just assumed (as not familiar with Macs) that the OS had not done a "clone" but some kind of "copy" which had the side effect of defragmenting / consolidating.
Point possibly proven a few years later when I swapped to a smaller SSD - the restore process worked just fine on the mismatched discs - a simple clone would have complained about lack of space.
Over time the machine slowed down though and even though it's very rarely used these days, I'm tempted to do the restore thing again, just to see if that speeds it up.
In Linux-land I've discovered that running "fstrim" manually has an effect, despite it supposedly being auto enabled these days, and on my BTRFS discs it's amazing the difference made by the btrfs balance command on an SSD that is three years old and had never run that command. Not just a small but appreciable speedup (particularly at boot) but also quite a lot of extra free space!
And there's me thinking that XP was the last OS I'd need to run "mydefrag" on, on a regular basis...
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
