Monday 18 June 2012

Is Defragmentation necessary for your Mac?

Over a period of time, the data on your hard drive becomes scattered and unorganized. When the hard disk is empty, the file system is free to write the data on the hard disk, but after a few deletions and rewriting processes, unwanted spaces are created ,breaking the sequence between related data. So, due to this process data on your hard drive is divided into chunks. In this condition when you open any file, processor takes more time to fetch scattered pieces of data from hard drive.
Solution to organize scattered data in sequential order:-

Defragmentation is a process that scans your hard drives for this scattered data, and puts things back into sequential order. In layman words you can say- “ Defragmentation means to keep fragmented data together in contiguous memory location.” It minimizes the data accessing time by the hard disk and helps your computer to run more quickly.
Effects of fragmentation:-
  • Fagmented files on your hard drive affects system performance.
  • It can corrupt file system and partition table.
  • If your hard drive has less amount of free space then there are chances that the files get separated into multiple fragments as they are being written to your hard drive.
Steps to perform Defragmentation:-

Windows needs defragging more often than Mac computers. In most versions of Windows, including Windows XP and Windows Vista, a disk defrag utility is embedded into the operating system. If you are using Microsoft Windows XP, you can find the defrag program by clicking here:-
Start-->All Programs-->Accessories-->System Tools-->Disk Defragmenter.
The Disk defrag dialog box will appear, choose the drive you want to defrag.

On the Linux platform, ext2 filesystems can be defragmented by tools as e2defrag, while you can defrag ext3 file systems with the 'shake' command.  If you are running a Mac or use Linux, you don't have to worry about defragmenting your disk, because new version of Mac file system i.e HFS+ has the ability to minimize the chance of fragmentation of up to 20 MB file size.

This file system works basically to prevent heavy file fragmentation, however it cannot perform free space optimization in your drive. If you want to defrag files more than 20 MB file size ,you can use third party tools available in market, idefrag are good defragmentation tools for Mac users.

You can schedule defragging program in your computer either in night before going on bed, or run the defragging utility once a week . If you are doing regular defragmentation of your hard drive this will help to keep your system running fast and and thus do more work in less time. Apart from above you can also increase USB drive performance by applying defragmentation to it.


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