Google

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

How to speed up Mac with disk-related tune up


You can increase Mac OS X performance and make your Mac more responsive with certain disk level activities. Here we are discussing some ways to eliminate the typical hurdles from a smooth Mac performance.

 

Keep free space on startup drive

The free space on hard disk is used as an extension of physical RAM whereas there are many applications which use the hard disk as a scratch area. It is recommended to maintain adequate amount of free space on Mac drive because more the free space in your hard disk, the lesser the chance of your Mac struggling because of a lack of space so, you should keep at least 10GB of free space (after a restart) for normal usage. While running professional apps like Final Cut or Adobe CS2, you will need more free space.

 

Speed of hard drive matters

It may happen that despite of having an enough amount of free space in your drive, your Mac is run very slow. The issue could lie with the speed of your disk. If you are shopping for a new hard drive, get a drive with a low seek time and high spindle speed. The drives with speed of 7200 RPM or more, make good system drives. 

An intelligent Mac drive partitioning

Partitioning Mac drive can save your efforts. It is suggested to keep your system volume as big as possible. Many applications (particularly ones from Apple - such as Final Cut Pro) require to be installed on the system volume. The file system in OS X is too smart to maintain optimization and prevent massive fragmentation in Mac volume. This, in addition to optimizing your hard drive every so often, will help you get the best performance out of OS X. For a badly fragmented drive, Stellar Drive defrag is a nice option to improve Mac performance. 

How an additional hard disk improve Mac speed ?

Additional hard disk helps to enhance your Mac performance in a number of ways

  1. When there are two drives in your machine, they share the load and it's like having a two lane highway instead of a single lane highway
  2. While you use your second hard disk as the scratch disk for your editing app, if defragmentation causes any severe fall in performance, you can always 're-initialize' your second hard disk without much trouble.
  3. A RAID association among drives, almost double the sustained data transfer rate due to data striping between the drives. Running RAID arrays as a secondary storage medium is a popular idea in professional editing studios since it maintains Mac speed and allows editing HD videos in runtime. Technically, it is not recommended to run RAID 0 as a primary boot array since it doubles the chances of data loss due to hard drive failure.

1 comment:

  1. Indeed an informative post for the Mac users. To kill resource-hungry programs & limit battery consumption by apps running in background, I use MacRapidizer. This reliable & revolutionary Mac cleaner is simply amazing. User can access the premium features & enhance Mac battery life at a discount of 67% on the original amount. This offer is valid for a limited period.

    ReplyDelete