Should I defrag Mac Lion , Defrag Mac OS X or prior versions of Mac

Should I defrag Mac OS X 10.7 or prior versions or not? - A very general question being asked recently by almost all the Mac users. The Mac users switching to Mac Lion are facing slower Mac since the upgrade. Although Apple is quite confident that there is no need to defrag Mac disk since the system has its own optimization tool. But it also recommends defragmentation if a disk contains frequently updated large files.

If a user has large Mac files but doesn't want to defrag Mac disk , then it is must to create a complete backup of all your important files and applications. Then you can re-install your Mac operating system and restore your backup files back to the system. Of course its a time consuming activity but eventually will make your Mac system to run faster in accessing your large files. Cloning utilities are the better options to create a complete backup of Mac drive.

 

Defrag Mac Os X

Fragmentation is the process of splitting your files into multiple parts and storing it to different locations on the hard drive. But, it takes more time to read fragmented files rather than a one lump of files. So, the basic requirement is to reduce the chances of fragmentation.

The HFS+ file system in Mac OS X is strong enough to handle fragmentation this is because the file system under Mac doesn't use the recently freed space as much as possible and look for other available free space to store the files and other information. And another thing Mac OS X uses method that will clump the smaller space in the hard disks into larger portions. And Mac OS X already performs its own defragmentation process which is known as “Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering.” This greatly reduces the chances of fragmenting the files.

 

How is defragmentation different from optimization?

Disk optimization is different from Mac defragmentation. This deals with the organization of related files into logical groups to improve the Mac performance of the system rather than splitting it into multiple chunks across the hard disk. The most popular Mac tool to defrag Mac disk is Stellar Drive Defrag. The application is capable enough to improve the performance of your system.

Some Mac users are often confused whether they should defrag their Mac OS X or not? However, most users would rather use the disk optimization tools because it will enhance the performance of their system rather than defragmenting their files.