It's not built-in and of course apple will never admit it, but yes, it can benefit from a defrag too. All depends on file sizes, etc. See here:
http://forums.mactalk.com.au/20/32660-do-you-need-defrag-your-mac-hd-answer-revealed.html
No, you don't need to de-fragment on typical Mac (HFS+) drives.
Mac OS X, since Tiger, will automatically de-fragment files of 20 (MB) megabytes or fewer. This works quite well.
The HFS/HFS+ file system is fragmentation-resistant and has been since 1985.
It's not like the typical PC with DOS, which couldn't go a busy month without needing reorganisation. Those FAT (FAT-16, FAT-32) drives regularly needed help, but even NTFS (the default on Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista) does not need de-fragmentation often.
what's defrag?
guys,
if i have a external HDD of 1TB that is formatted into fat32(so that my pc can read them too), do i need to defrag that often?
I can only answer your second half of the query. For external hdd or slave drives, it is not critical to defrag even for windows unless you run applications using those drives (ie install softwares in slaves).
As for mac, you may ignore defragging external hdd unless it is quite full.
As a general rule of thumb, always keep the memory space below 90% full at its max to allow some freedom for it to juggle the hard disk space. It may not be wise to max out a hdd whether master or slave drives as it can slow down a search function or utility program.
Oh, do not install norton to take control of your disk drives. It can slow down the whole system as it tries to be smart. I do not doubt norton has very intuitive programs, but it does slow down the system when you let the application run on the background full time.
i'm beginning to transit from pc to mac slowly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plusguys,
what is HFS?
if i have a external HDD of 1TB that is formatted into fat32(so that my pc can read them too), do i need to defrag that often?