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.

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.

Which is better for managing Mac partition- Disk Utility or Third party tool?

Disk Utility is an all in one utility of Mac OS X, which allows you to resolve all disk related issues. Mac users can perform formatting, partitioning, repairing and some maintenance on disks including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images etc. With the passage of time, various installations, un-installations, upgrades can change the permissions of various files. Disk utility helps you to repair the permission of certain files. To do this, click on a disk and then select the “First Aid” tab, from here you can choose “Verify Disk Permissions”. If permissions problems are found, you must select “Repair Disk Permissions”.

How to resize Mac partition with Disk Utility:-

If your Mac partitions are encrypted or non journalled then you cannot resize them. You can turn it on by selecting a particular partition and enable journaling icon in the toolbar. Open the Disk Utility Applications/Utilities folder, select the drive and click to partition tab, Disk Utility will do a Verify Disk on the partition being resized.

But, the interface of Disk Utility is not user friendly so, there are many third party tools which offer more easy-to-use interface to resolve Mac disk related issues.

Reliable tool to partition your Mac drive- Stellar Partition Manager

Many Mac users do not even partition their Mac hard drive and they keep their data along with the system files.

Do you know why it is not safe?

If your Mac is unable to boot due to some reason then you may need to reinstall your Mac OS X and you will lose all your important data. On other hand, if your Mac OS X has several partitions, any issue with boot volume does not affect your data at all. Stellar Partition Manager can easily resolve partitioning related issues like creation of a new one, formatting, deletion, resizing hide/reveal a partition. No matter, on which version of Mac OS X you are working.

Add a Volume;-

Using this application you can easily create a new volume by using available free space. When you run Stellar Partition Manager and click to the next button on its home screen, in left panel just select the hard drive on which you want to create new partition and click Add button in the toolbar. specify a name, move the slider to set a size, and click OK button, After that, click Start button in the toolbar, a warning message pops up. Click continue and you will see the new volume in the left side and it would be formatted as Mac OS X Extended by default.

Format a Parition:-

Run this application, select the hard drive containing the volume to be formatted, on the left. Now, select this volume in the middle pane and click Format button. Now, click Start button, and then click Continue button on the message that pops up , After this task is finished, you can see this partition as empty.

Delete Partition:-

Select the volume which you want to delete and click to the delete button on toolbar. This process will help you to delete selected volume from your Mac hard drive.

Hide/Reveal partition:-

Stellar Partitioning software has an awesome feature in which you can hide selected volume for security purpose. This feature is not present in Disk Utility. Hidden partition can only be revealed by this tool.

Resize Mac partition:-

When you resize Mac volume by using Stellar Partition tool, it keeps all free spaces together (shift free space) so that you could make new volume but, this facility is not present in Disk Utility.

If you do resize on Mac volume with Disk Utility, free space will remain between two partition. So, Stellar Partition Manager is quite far better than Disk Utility.