Why defragment?

I have used my newly acquired Dual Xeon 1.7Ghz machine for about a month. And what happens? The disk need serious defragmenting! No kidding. I do less work on this machine than I do on my Powerbook and yet I never had to defragment my mac. Well, opinions vary on this and some swear by it. By, (ahem, ahem) according to Apple: "...there is little benefit to defragmenting." That is definitely the way a machine should work.

For those who simply have itchy fingers and want to defragment their mac, the typical choice would be iDefrag and the typical program to stay away from is Norton.

I am not sure how Windows work but the disk can get seriously fragmented if you do a lot of file copying and moving. In fact, I had VMWare running and I needed to download a 710MB file. Ran compmgmt.msc on the Windows machine and it told me to defragment right away! Interesting seeing that this disk is new and it has been running for less than 48 hours.