Monday 30 September 2013

How to get rid of badly fragmented Mac drive


Fragmentation in Mac:- 
 
In general words, file means a single entity which we open, work and close. As an example we can consider a file like a book which has several pages, each page remains in a logical order to read it properly. In technical words, a file is a bunch of small pieces of data which is kept in sequential order over Mac disk. Your system keeps the track of individual piece of data to access it fastly. With the passage of time, these files gets divided and it is being kept in scattered way over Mac disk, which is called fragmented data. Files can become "fragmented" over time as they are changed and saved. 

Why fragmentation happens? 

Fragmentation happens because files on the disk are constantly changing; being created, deleted, grown, or shrunk in size. For example, we have created three files: file1, file2 and file3

At present these files are organised into contigious memory in above added image.

Now we delete file2 lets see the situation :-

You can see the free space(two empty sectors) in above image.

Now, we'll create a new file, file 4, which is four sectors long.


File4 is splitted into two fragments ,two sectors in part "(a)" and two sectors in part "(b)". When Mac drive gets full of these kind of fragmented data, it is called badly fragmented drive. When you access(click) any fragmented files, Mac OS puts extra efforts to search over whole disk and it takes too much time. Due to this reason your Mac becomes slow. Defragmentation is the cure of fragmented volume and it helps to improve your Mac performance.

"The process of collecting each file fragments and keeping them back together in logical order is known as optimization or defragmentation"

This process helps to arrange all pieces of files in logical order. However, Apple says that it's new file system HFS+ is able to defrag files of upto 20 MB file size and Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible. In case of large files you have to buy some defragmenter for Mac. 

Do we need to optimize Mac? 

Defragmenting your hard drive can make a real sense and significant difference to your systems performance.

SSD- If you are using SSD then you do not need to defrag it because there is no movement, and there's actually no practical advantage to sectors which is being logically adjacent.

HDD- In case of HDD, you need to defrag your Mac because there is movement and each data remains in sectors which is logically arrenged.

Sometimes fragmentation occurs by continually appending data to existing files, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time.

There are many Mac disk defragmenter available in market like iDefrag, Drive Genius etc.. Stellar Drive Defrag is a versatile option to defrag Mac safely and it is fast, efficient defrag tool that ensures your system is always running at its optimum performanceIt's free version helps to see how badly your Mac disk fragmented. 2.5 version of this tool has several new features like email notification, temperature bar etc.

Features of Stellar Drive Defrag tool:-

1.It performs complete defragmentation to your entire volume by dragging the files into contiguous memory.

2. It defrags the metadata files in a Mac volume, clubs together the scattered free spaces in a volume.

3. This tool creates a bootable DVD, which is used to defrag the boot volume and also to start your non-booting Mac system.

4. It helps to gather all free space into a contiguous block.

5. Email notification helps you to notify the completion of defrag process

6. It includes temperature bar to keep an eye to the fluctuations of Mac drive temperature.
Conclusion: If you constantly increase and decrease your Mac hard drive size with lots of little files, you love to video editing, photoshop regularly, leave your machine running all night and you are facing slow Mac then you must get Stellar Drive Defrag to defrag drive Mac. It works awesome and ia a very reliable tool. I would like to say, just download it's demo version, scan your entire Mac and check the status of your hard drive. If it is badly fragmented just spend only $ 39 bucks and remove fragmented data to keep Mac optimized.

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