Learn How OS X Keeps Your Mac in Control

Being built on rock-solid UNIX foundation and featuring a slew of robust technologies, Mac OS X provides you unparalleled stability and performance. Performance is the cornerstone of Apple's Mac OS X. It has built-in safeguards to keep you going even if you are indulged in intensive image editing or any other CPU-intensive task. Mac OS X takes care of hard drive fragmentation to keep your system running at its best with its original snappiness. However, fragmentation might become a concern over time when your OS X drive runs out of space. Lets us understand how fragmentation occurs and how Mac keeps you from facing serious slowdowns.

Fragmentation occurs due to continual creation and deletion of files on the hard drive. In the event that you delete a file, the file system reuses this space to store new data or changes made to other files existing on the drive. If you create a file that is larger than the one you have deleted, then it will be broken into multiple segments and these segments will be allocated non-contiguous blocks of memory on the fly. This results in file system fragmentation, which in turn impacts your system performance. A number of variables may affect your Mac's performance, such as size of files stored on the hard drive, random-access mechanisms used by the disk, the order in which files get segmented.

Mac OS X has built-in measures to reduce the amount of file system fragmentation. OS X’s HFS+ file system prevents filling small portions of free space created after deleting files. Instead, it groups a number of small allocations into a single large allocation for storing logically-related data contiguously on the drive. OS X implements another unique safeguard known as 'Hot File Adaptive Clustering'. With this technique, Mac OS X moves all frequently-accessed and read-only files to a special region of the hard drive. OS X performs automatic defragmentation of these files during the move. Further, if you open a highly fragmented file, OS X defragments it before it shows up on your Mac desktop.

Amidst all these techniques, there is a good chance that your performance decreases with time. It happens when the drive is more than 90% occupied or almost full. To overcome these problems, you should take help of professional hard drive defragmentation tools for Mac. Nowadays, such utilities are bundled together to form a comprehensive package of essential software for Mac, known as Drive Toolbox for Mac. This comprehensive package has a range of built-in tools for maintaining your Mac system, such as SpeedUp Mac, Drive Clone, Partition Manager, Volume Repair, and more.