Pros and Cons of Defragmentation of Mac Drive

When you store your data on your hard drive, it acquires the memory in a non-continuous fashion as it finds large and unoccupied memory blocks. These memory blocks (i.e. fragments) are created in the memory when you delete or move some data from a memory location. Defragmentation is the process of physically re-arranging all the occupied large memory blocks in a logical order, thereby removing the fragments to optimize the performance of your Mac.

You might have ever thought how does it improve the performance of my Mac or does it affect the internal resources of my Mac machine. A non-professional user often thinks whether he should defrag Mac hard drive or not. This article is going to discuss the pros and cons of defragmentation on a Mac drive.

1. Pros of Mac Hard Drive Defragmentation

When it comes to optimizing the Mac performance, a user gets his mind directed towards Disk Defragmentation. Mac OS X formats its hard drive volumes with an intelligent HFS, HFS+, HFSX and HFS wrapper file systems that takes care of such internal processes. Let us see what the pros of disk defragmentation in Mac are:

1. Removes Fragments

The file systems in Mac prove their intelligence by shifting forward the physical memory locations and removing all the unoccupied memory in a continuous data stream. This automatically defrags the memory and improves the Mac OS X performance.

2. Memory Optimization

Mac’s intelligent file system refreshes the memory by re-allocating the physical locations on the hard drive in a continuous fashion. This makes a Mac respond faster to all executed commands and hence, memory is optimized.

3. Improved Performance

Mac Defragmentation improves the performance of the hard drive as well as the execution of all processes. Therefore, when you try accessing an application or executing a command, you get result in a short span of time.

2. Cons of Mac Hard Drive Defragmentation

Defragmentation is the process of removing fragments from the continuous streams of data stored on the hard drive in order to shorten the execution time, and thereby enhance the overall performance of your machine. Defragmentation is completely in favour of your machine. However, in spite of several pros of drive defragmentation, you might also have noticed some cons i.e.

1. High System Resource Utilization

Defragmentation is a process that highly utilizes the system resources and keeps them busy until you get the process completed. In the meantime, the machine gets slower and you may not run any graphic or large application.

2. Time-Consuming Process

The amount of time consumed in drive defragmentation relies on the amount of data stored and fragments on your hard drive. It takes time to complete the process, if your hard drive is almost full. However, it completes shortly when you have the hard drive with large amount of unallocated memory.