Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Is your Mac slow Hard drive fragmentation might be the reason behind it
Is your Mac slow Hard drive fragmentation might be the reason behind it
While saving files in the hard drive of Mac, Data is mostly stored at contigous memory locations i.e. Single file is stored at multiple locations. When we try to save files in the Mac HDD then file is broken into parts and these parts of file are saved at different locations.This process is known as Fragmentation. Free and empty spaces are created between the used space in the hard drive and this decrease the Mac performance. Deletion of files can also creates free spaces in between the used space. So to make this free space useful and to make Mac work faster we should do Defragmentation.
Defragmentationis the process of collecting all the used space and free space of hard drive together. The process of defragmentation decreases the fragmentation of drive & improves the hard drive performance.
Effects of Fragmentation:
Due to fragmentation of the drive, the processing speed of your system becomes slow. Like if you are searching for a file in fragmented hard drive then hard drive read eye have to move to multiple positions to search for different parts of file. So this will take longer processing than usual.
Similarly if you are writing a file to hard drive then it will take much longer time due to storing of file at multiple locations. So disk fragmentation will degrade the system performance and is unhealthy for the drive in the long run.
How to defrage hard drive?
For effective defragmentation of hard drive you need to get a good defrag tool. I personally recommend a very good defrag tool i.e.Stellar Drive Defrag. This software works very effectively and efficiently. You can buy this software from stellarinfo.com. Stellar Drive Defrag has a very rich GUI which makes it easy to use. It also supports various hard drive models.
Features of this software are:
- Free space optimization
- Full defragmentation
- File defragmentation
- Defragmentation of metadata files
After defragmentation is over all the files will be stored in the contigous memory locations. Defragmentation will boost your Mac performance and it will increase the processing speed of Mac.
But you need to know these things before defragmenting Hard drive:
- If you do defragmentation of your hard drive very frequently then it can shorten the life of your hard drive.
- Their is a possibility that files can damaged during defragmentation although it happens very rarely. Prepare a backup plan before going for hard drive defragmentation.
Available link for download