An Efficient way to handle Mac fragmentation

One of my friends used to work with Mac OS X – 10.4 Tiger. Over a period of time, his Mac starting performing slow. Applications began to take more than usual time to open. He shared his problem with me. As I am not an expert so, started searching online for some ways to improve performance of Mac.

During my investigation, I got some prominent reasons for sluggish behavior of Mac and one of them is Fragmentation. With the passage of time we delete, create so many files , which creates spaces in Mac hard drive and starting to keep data into small pieces, called fragmentation. I would like to discuss in detail so that you could understand the facts of fragmentation.

When you save files(e.g, ten files) on Mac and they all take continuous positions on the hard drive, and out of these ten, you delete the fifth-one. After that, save a new file, this new file takes the space freed by the fifth-one. But, What will happen if the size of this new file is larger than deleted one. New file will be divided into chunks and one of which occupies the position freed by the deleted one and another parts will be kept in different memory locations. In this case, the Operating System has to create a link to maintain the linking among these parts of files.

Since, data has not been placed in contiguous memory location thus, OS will take much time to access those data. We can overcome this issue by using an efficient third-party Mac defragmentation software. Later version of Mac OS (after Mac OS X 10.4) have been introduced with new file system called HFS+, which can decrease the chances of fragmentation and handle fragmentaed files upto 20 MB in size.

Whereas, third-party defrag utilities help to keep all the scattered fragments of data together in contiguous memory location. You can get back performance of your Mac. I have suggested my friend to use Stellar Drive Defrag , I went through various sites, blogs, articles, etc and found this software as the best one. He has follow my suggestion and get his Mac performance as a rocket speed.

You can defrag your whole Mac or any selected volume in just a single click. You can optimize the free space of your Mac hard drive. Every information has been written very nicely in the user manual of this tool. I and my friend found it very easy to use and full of useful features.