Thursday 9 July 2015

How to Perfectly Optimize the Mac Disk File System

Mac is one of the most popular OS from Apple Inc., which is used by millions of users worldwide. There are many added advantage of using Mac OS X over other OS. One of the main advantage of Mac is it doesn’t require any specific process to defrag the Hard Drive. If you have files of very large size, then it is normal for the hard drive to be fragmented and it reduce the overall speed of the system.

Fragmentation: - Fragmentation is the process that occurs when large size files are created and deleted from the Mac hard drive. The Hard drive may not be able to store all the data of same files together, which increases the hard drive activity, as it has to look more than two places for a single file, which reduce the speed of the system?

On the other hand defragmentation is the process, which keeps the same data together on the hard drive. This process recognizes the similar data and keeps them together, so that the hard drive will get all similar files in the same place without searching.

Difference between Defragmentation in Windows and Mac Operating System:-

In Windows, fragmentation is a very common issue and Microsoft provides the lots of utilities to support it. That is why the users who switch to Mac from Windows have the tendency to defrag their hard drive within the regular interval.

Though, the latest version of Windows include with the improved file fragmentation feature, but users who are using this OS for years continuing doing regular defragmentation process. In the newest version of Windows the 'Disk Defragmenter' function is renamed as 'Optimize Drives’, which is more capable of doing defragmentation of Windows hard drive.  

However, Mac system do not includes any of such defragging utility or any derive optimization tool. If a user feels that his Mac drive is fragmented and he is looking for an inbuilt solution in disk utility, then it will be a completely waste of time, as there is no such inbuilt tool provided by Mac.

There are reasons why Mac does not have any hard drive optimization tool; one is Mac OS X HFS Plus file system, which defrag all the files automatically under Hot File Adaptive Clustering (HFC) process. Another reason is latest Macs ship with SSD, or Flash Storage drives, which do not need defragmentation process as they already have their own processes, known as TRIM.

Some Exceptional Defragmentation Cases in Mac Systems:-

Usually users who regularly upgrade their hard drive will not get such fragmentation issue in their Mac system. However, if you are a stick on a same hard drive since many years and you have hundreds or thousands of large files such as a music files, creative documents, etc.

And these files use tools like Logic Pro, Photoshop, Adobe Premier, Final Cut, or many similar apps that create or run many large multimedia files.
So you may face the fragmentation issue and also require tools to defrag your data with any utility.

Remember Below mentioned Facts at the time of Defragmentation of Your Hard Drive:
  • Use defragging process only with hard drives not with SSD's
  • Don’t defrag your Mac drive regularly, as OS X always writes small files in one batch which automatically eliminates most of the fragmentation issues.
  • Hard drives are usually fast in the beginning and with increasing data storage they becomes slowest. Data can’t be magically moved to up to take available space, there can be many holes developed with lots of read and write operation. 
  • The first 50% drive is faster than last 50% because of more sectors in each track, so that the heads have less data to move and can gather more data on a single time. So if you have maintained the first 50%, the drive works faster.
  • Over the time Mac hard drive can get slow down because of lots of new file creation and old file deletion?
Stellar Drive Defrag is one of the most trusted tools for Mac defragmentation. This utility has also available in a free demo version by which you can check its efficiency and is compatible with latest OS X Yosemite.

This tool helps you to increase the speed as well as the performance of your Mac hard drive. It runs on your Mac hard drive and searches for all the scattered data fragments as well as organizes them in a proper way to optimize the speed of your system. It creates a free contiguous memory space instead of fragmented empty space.

You can see all the similar data file into the same color so that you can identify all similar block in the hard disk. This efficient utility can also monitor the drive temperature fluctuation at the time of defragmentation Free.