Defrag a Mac’s hard disk: Is There A Need To Do This
April 4, 2011
Some Mac users would offer wonder if they need to defrag a Mac’s hard drives. This information will discussed Mac’s hard disk defragmentation and what you can do as Mac users?
Fragmentation is a process where files are created and deleted more often. This involves storing files in different locations when that hard disk space is already occupied with other files and it have to locate for other locations where it need to store the files in the hard disks. This greatly reduces the response time of the system to access the entire files because it has to look for different places in the hard disk.
For users who are using the Mac platforms they don’t need to worry about the defragmentation issues because the Mac system itself is designed to deal with fragmentation and it is already built with routine maintenance in tweaking the Mac system. This does not either affect the performance of the system thus defragmenting the Mac hard disk is not needed frequently.
But in reality, as Mac users are using the system more often and access the hard disk too frequently this can affect the system’s performance in the long run. This is quite true if you create and delete large number of files in the hard disk thus increasing the chances of the disk to get fragmented in the process and can even slow down the file system performance.
When this happen, it is quite recommended that you select third party defragmentation applications that will defrag the Mac hard drive. But before you go on installing this defragmenter tool it is important that you back up all your important files. It is wiser also that you use applications such as driver setup that will initialize the disk and restore the files after defragging process takes place. Just keep in mind that reinitializing the hard disk at times will completely erase all the files in the hard disk and making a complete backup is quite recommended in order to restore all the files to its original state.
The defragging process can take longer because of the large amount of data that need to be rearranged and reorganized. However there are third party defragging tools that cannot recover the critical portion of the hard disks. Thus to prevent the risk of losing all the important files a complete backup in the system should be done prior to defragging the Mac system. There are a of defragmentation applications that you can select in the market and each of it has its own features and capabilities that are needed for defragging all the files in the hard drive and tweaking the Mac system to a better performance.
So the next time you are faced with the issues whether you need to defrag a Mac. The answer is simply yes. Although Mac don’t recommend it but doing it in a way can be advantageous for Mac system. This will increase the access time in locating for files easily and at the same time improving the Mac system performance.
