Thursday 13 February 2014

Mac Drive toolbox to fix overall disk related problems on Mac OS X


Are you searching for some application to solve disk related issues in your Mac Lion , Mountain Lion or Mavericks? Here we are with the solution.

Different computer operating systems use different file systems to format their hard drives. For example, Windows operating systems use both FAT and NTFS file systems, whereas Mac OS X uses the HFS+ file system to format its hard drive. To be more precise, in order to use a hard drive on a particular computer, you need to format it with the file system it supports. Based on the flaws a file system contains, data storage often becomes faulty or messy, which leads to degraded performance of the computers.

As mentioned earlier, Mac OS X formats its hard drive with the HFS+ file system (also known as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) that is quite smart as compared to its predecessors in different versions of Macintosh operating system. When you format a hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), its storage space is divided into blocks of certain sizes that are divisible by 8, 16, 24, 32, and so on, aiming for data storage. When a program is executed, it requests the file system for storage blocks to store the data produced as the program’s output. In response to this, Mac file system allocates the nearest empty blocks to save the data. Meanwhile, there are a lot of chances that a few of the blocks contain free space along with the data, which is termed as the fragment. Likewise, a hard drive may contain a slew of fragmented blocks. 

“Fragmentation is a phenomenon that occurs due to inefficient utilization of the storage space of the hard drives, which results in reduced performance of the computer.”

Suppose that an array numbers [2, 4, 6, 8, 12] is produced as the result of execution of a program. Based on the size of the array produced, the program requests for 34 bytes space on the hard drive. However, since a large block of 34 bytes is not available, Mac file system divides the data into two segments, where one segment is of 32 bytes and another is of 2 bytes. However, an inefficient storage allocation algorithm may divide a file of 32 bytes into a number of segments and store in non-contiguous blocks, many of which contain free space. This causes storage space being wasted. In such a situation, the free space available inside the contiguously allocated regions is termed as internal fragmentation.

On the other hand, the implementation of an inefficient storage allocation algorithm causes storing a single file at multiple locations being scattered. Besides, such algorithms also fail to reorganize the scattered data of a single file in a logical order. Now, since free spaces are available outside the allocated regions, these are thus termed as external fragmentation.

In case of external fragmentation, since large blocks of free space are unavailable, HFS+ file system breaks large files into segments of smaller sizes. This causes scattering of data of a single large file and thus, it is termed as data fragmentation.

In fact, fragmentation is one of the major problems that computer users face. Fragmentation results in poor response from the data stored on the hard drive. In such a situation, your Mac boots sluggishly, programs execute poorly, and many like symptoms ultimately point towards degraded performance of your Mac system. A highly fragmented disk may lead to its crash and you may lose all your data, which you cannot avoid unless you use a professional application to defrag Mac drive.

Though Mac OS X includes Disk utility to fix the problems you encounter when using your Mac, it lacks disk defragmentation and speedup/cleanup tool to improve Mac performance. Well, you do not have to fuss over the issue, as you can use external disk defragmentation application instead. 

“The term defragmentation refers to the process that involves reorganizing the storage blocks of the hard drive logically in order to minimize the number of fragments.”

In addition to the internal factors, many external factors are also responsible for poor performance of your Mac. In order to fix all these problems simultaneously, a professional Mac cleaning application is required that can clean up the following areas of your Mac: 

Overfilled Mac volumes 

Today, computers provide huge amount of data storage space (e.g. 500GB or 1TB) in order to store massive amount of data. In order to store different types of data separately, you partition this storage space into required number of volumes. In case you have a collection of your favorite movies, there are chances that the volume storing movies being overfilled.

A volume is referred to as overfilled if the amount of free space available on it is below 10% of its storage capacity. Ideally, a disk must not be filled more than 90% of its capacity.

Since an overfilled disk may lead to corruption anytime, make sure none of your Mac volumes contains data more than 90% of its storage capacity (i.e. is not overfilled). In case your Mac has a number of volumes, you need to go for a check. If you find any of its volumes overfilled, remove all useless data and make your Mac system free from any such risk. Instead, you can use a professional Mac cleanup application that is able to remove unused files, large files, and other system-generated wastes. This not only improves the performance of your Mac, but frees up disk space as well. 

Mac Login items 

You must have noticed that one or more of the applications installed on your Mac are launched automatically as it boots to desktop. This is because certain applications create startup shortcuts for themselves when they are installed. After that, whenever your Mac boots, these shortcuts are executed, thereby utilizing Mac system resources. This affects the Mac startup process and hence, it boots sluggishly.

In fact, more the number of login items the poorer is the Mac startup process. In order to remove all these items, you need to track the following path: Apple menu > System Preference > Users & Groups, and then click Login Items tab.

In the Login Items tab, choose your account at the left and click to select unnecessary login items, and then click delete (-) button. Well, if you do not want to remove these items manually, then you can use a Mac cleaning app instead. 

Email self-downloads 

Mac OS X includes Apple’s email client app that in addition to its several exciting features, facilitates having a quick-view of the email attachments by rapid double-clicking them.

In fact, every time you have quick-view of such an attachment, it is downloaded to your Mac automatically at a default email downloads location. This evidently means that based on the number of times you have had quick-view of an attachment, several copies of it can be found in downloads folder.

Remove all these automatically downloaded email attachments not only to free up Mac disk space, but also to increase your Mail app’s speed. 

Duplicate files 

You must be downloading images, songs, videos, applications, and many other things on your Mac from the Internet, don’t you? Once these files are downloaded, they are found at their default download locations, from where you either copy or move them to the locations where other files of similar type are stored.


However, if you have copy these files and save them to some other locations on your Mac disk, you actually duplicate these files. In order to remove all duplicate files stored on your Mac drive, you can use a professional Mac cleanup application.

Professional Mac cleanup applications are able to remove these system wastes not only from the boot volume of your Mac drive, but from other secondary volumes as well. This boosts the performance of your Mac considerably. 
Stellar Drive Toolbox v3.0


Therefore, in order to fix up all disk related problems, you are recommended to go for a drive toolbox for Mac, as it can fix up every feasible cause minimizing Mac performance effectively.

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