“Perhaps you are not aware of the fact that apart
from a few common causes like, the overfilled
hard drive, accumulation of temporary files, and obsolete system configuration,
fragmentation is the major cause of degraded the performance of your
Mac. Fragmentation, nevertheless, is one of the
foremost causes of the poor performance of your Mac that causes data
scattering. Nothing else, but the HFS+ file system is responsible for fragmentation
on Macs.”
Since Mac computers perform considerably well as
compared to others, they are termed as the excellent computers. However, perhaps
you have not thought of your Mac slowing down gradually after a certain period
of rigorous usage when booting as well as during data read/write operations. Meanwhile,
you come across a colored spinning beach ball that many times leads to Mac
freezing. During this state, your Mac boots sluggishly and the applications run
poorly. Sometimes, one or more of the apps cash when running concurrently.
In such an annoying situation, many of the users do
not even know what the causes of the issue and they directly contact with Mac
technicians for help. Taking help from experts when you do not know what to do is
certainly a wise decision. However, even this does not guarantee that the same
issue will not arise again. Well, you need to be clear with the fact that
excellence lacks a lot to meet perfection and therefore, the performance
degradation is strongly associated with every machine and so does with Macs.
“Fragmentation refers
to data being scattered when it is stored on the hard drives.”
Mac OS X uses the HFS+ file system to format its
hard drive (i.e. to be used for data read/write operations), as it cannot
read/write data on a raw disk. During formatting, the Mac file system splits up
the hard drive space into blocks in order to store files individually. However,
this scheme does not involve the sizes of the files (which is the vital factor)
to be stored in the storage blocks. As a result, when you save a large file on
your Mac, based on its size, Mac file system divides this into a number of
segments of smaller sizes. After that, each of these segments gets a separate
storage block.
As mentioned above, since Mac file system divides
the storage space into blocks, each file having its size larger than that of
the block is broken into segments of smaller sizes. This means that a file
segment is saved properly in the storage block based on their mutual (i.e. of
both the storage block and file segment) size compatibility. If the size of the
file segment is smaller than that of the storage block it is allocated, then
that particular block contains free space along with the file segment.
Likewise, a slew of such blocks can be found inside contiguously allocated
regions on your Mac drive, which are thus termed as internal fragmentation.
During execution of the system files of any user
program, binary data is produced at intermediate stages, which is stored on
your Mac drive. However, certain storage allocation algorithms are inefficient
and therefore, fail to organize these blocks. As a result, data of a single
file is stored being scattered. Since many unallocated storage blocks surround
the allocated ones, all these blocks collectively are referred to as causing external
fragmentation.
As mentioned above, in case of external
fragmentation, the segments of an individual file are located in non-contiguous
blocks. This means that data of the file is scattered and is thus termed as data
fragmentation.
Apart from the
internal factors, a few external ones are also responsible for fragmentation.
For example, moving a large file from one location to another on your Mac
empties a slew of the storage blocks. Mac users believe that Macs do not come across
fragmentation, as they include the HFS+ file system that minimizes the need to defrag
files on Mac OS X. However, it does not eliminate fragments.
“Defragmentation
involves rearranging the storage blocks of the hard drive logically aspiring to
reduce the response time of data, which eliminates that fragments throughout
the hard drives and improves the performance of the Mac system.”
Whenever you open a file on your Mac, the HFS+ file
system scans this file thoroughly for fragments. If this file is found to be
highly fragmented (i.e. having eight or more fragments), it is defragmented automatically.
However, not every file satisfies this criteria (i.e. the file should not be more
than 20MB of size) to be defragmented automatically. Therefore, you have to defrag
large files (i.e. the files more than 20MB of size) using a professional disk
defragmentation application and hence, to get its performance improved.
Mac disk defragmentation application analyzes (scans
all storage blocks, storage algorithm used for storage blocks allocation, and
the remaining free blocks as well) your Mac drive thoroughly at the initial
step. Technically, defragmentation involves maintaining the storage blocks that
containing data to yield the highly efficient storage blocks with reduced
number of fragments. For this, all storage blocks containing data are
rearranged logically, which improves the productivity of your Mac. Besides, it
uses compaction mechanism to impede fragmentation to occur again by creating
larger regions of free spaces on your Mac drive. This minimizes the response
time of data and hence, it improves the performance of your Mac system.
When it comes to selection of a reliable defragmentation app to defrag files on Mac, since a slew of defragmentation apps for Mac
are available on the Internet, you may get confused and choose any of them
randomly. However, using an inefficient defragmentation app may cause undesired
results. In fact, you may lose your data due to inefficient rearrangement of
the storage blocks. Well, if you are unable to final which app is to choose for
your Mac, then you can contact Mac experts for help. You must go through the
software user manual before using it, as the security of both your data and the
Mac system is must. Besides, there is no doubt that you do not want your data
to be lost.
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