Because data are continually being written, deleted, and resized, then there are more and more fragments. What is defragmentation?ĭisk fragmentation occurs when a file is broken up into pieces to fit on the disk.

What is defragmentation, how to defragment on Mac OS, where is the data going after defragmentation? Can it be recovered? In this article, you will find the answers. How To Defrag Your MacBook Pro with HDD – Drive Genius Since you need a third-party tool to defragment a MacBook Pro, we decided to highlight Drive Genius, a well-reputed computer cleaning tool with an efficient. So while the need to defrag a Mac is fairly rare, it is still a useful process and could potentially help improve your workflow. The only thing Apple recommends is to make a full backup of your data, format the hard drive, reinstall the. The macOS does not provide a tool for defragmenting the hard drive.Starting with that version, Macs came equipped with a new filing system that did a better job grouping of data together, reducing fragmenting and the need to reorganize the data later. Defragging Mac computers became less important with the release of Mac OS X 10.2, an operating system version from way back in 2002.Personally I prefer iDefrag.DeFRaG Mac OS By 4gamnicipexd Follow | Public IDefrag, Drive Genius and a handful of other utilities will all defragment your hard drive as well. If done as part of a backup routine the time hit may not be terrible but it's free to do it this way.

This is done using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and requires an extra hard drive. The most popular options for defragmenting a hard drive for OS X I've used and run across are:Ĭloning the hard drive to another drive and back. For your standard user - a near non-issue. The OS itself also defrags 'small' (20MB or smaller) files on the fly since 10.3 (Panther).įragmenting still happens and you can see performance drop because of it, especially in video editing systems or a workflow that requires the ability to read or write large files quickly to the disk. Speaking for Mac OS X specifically HFS+ does a decent enough job of trying to keep things from being fragmented compared to older systems but it still happens just not on the same scale. All filesystems will fragment but newer ones are more resistant to fragmenting so badly.

Useful in certain circumstances but it's less of an issue than it was with FAT or regular HFS. My answer on Server fault fits here as well : I suggest also taking a look at Server Fault's answers as well: Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS Xįragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existingĪggressive read-ahead and write-behind caching means that minor Hard disk capacity is generally much greater now than a few years ago. I think the best answer for this comes straight from this apple support KB

How do i defrag a mac