If you ask most people if it is necessary to defrag your PC, they will have an immediate answer. However, if you go up to most techies and ask them if it's necessary to defrag your Mac, you'll get a plethora of answers. That puts most mac owners at an impasse: to defrag or not to defrag, that is the question.

FreeFrag on MacTalk took up the burden to answer this question that has been plaguing a lot of the Mac users who want to get more from their machine. After intensive testing, the verdict is in, and the results may surprise you. After installing iDefrag 1.6.1 on the test system (20" iMac with Core Duo 2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb RAM, 232Gb HD with 102Gb Free), multiple programs were tested for loading times via pre and post boot.

After averaging the time for both tests, it looks like the system was even faster before the defrag than after. However, the stats of the post defragmentation were really dragged down by the long start-up boot time the system went through. All the applications tested with the exception of XP did get a relatively good boost from the defragmentation. So is it worth it?

It looks like a trade-off between initial boot and program speed. If you keep your system on most of the time, then perhaps defragging you system may be a good move. But if you just power-up the system every so often to run a few programs, then defragging may slow you down.

That brings us back to the first question, to defrag or not to defrag. Well, it depends on what you're going to be doing and on your computing habits.