Defragmentation – An Important Aspect to Optimize Mac Performance

Fragmented hard drive is not a rare term instead it is a common situation that occurs with every hard drive irrespective to the Operating System (OS) installed in it. But, some operating systems like Mac OS X have safety guards for preventing fragmentation, thus their users do not get to know about the fact that their hard drives too get fragmented. With time as you keep on saving and deleting files on your hard drive, the small chunks of memory are created.

These small chunks of memory are called fragmented space on hard drive. Now when you save a new file on such hard drive, it can occupy any of these free memory fragments. However, if the file is larger than the available memory chunk, then the OS will divide the file into parts and save them on different locations of this drive. In this way, fragments of file too are created and file fragmentation took place. Now when you try to access this file, the OS for sure will take more time as it need to search for all the parts of this fragmented file. Moreover saving a new file will also take more than usual time as the OS has to search free space on fragmented drive. In this way, a computer with fragmented hard drive deteriorates its speed.

However, according to Apple, the HFS+ file system avoids filling recently freed space on its hard drive and thus prevents file level fragmentation. The ‘Hot File Adaptive Clustering’ of OS X based machines creates a hot zone of frequently accessed files and thus optimizes their access time. Apart from this OS X is smart enough to perform defragging on small files. But, situations arise when OS X too becomes unable to defrag Mac hard drive and at that time Mac users too come across the dipped performance of their machine. These situations are:

• When you have big amount of large files such as video files in your hard drive.
• When your hard drive gets completely filled and has less than 10% free space.

In both these above mentioned situations, the built in safeguards of Mac OS X to prevent fragmentation fail to do any needful, and thus users have to face the sluggish behavior of their smart machine. The best way to optimize Mac in such cases is its defragmentation. There are various non-Apple utilities to defrag Mac hard drive available online and users have to select the best tool that defrags Mac files and optimizes all the available free space and hence improves the overall performance of their machines. Most of these tools enable users to create bootable DVD of their machine and hence perform the defragmentation of boot volume as well.