![]() Sometimes it’s not your HDD that’s having problems. What else can I do if my Mac is running slowly? ![]() It comes with a tool that lets you create a secondary drive so that you can defrag and otherwise optimize your main hard drive, can find and eliminate duplicate files, does secure erasure of drives, and lets you clone a drive if necessary. This app is used by Apple employees at the Genius Bar when someone comes in with an extremely sluggish Mac that fits the criteria for defragging in other words, the user has a lot of huge files stored on the HDD.ĭrive Genius 4 is not a one-trick pony. ![]() Since there’s no defragmentation utility built into OS X, how would a creative be able to defrag a large HDD filled with big files? About the only - and best - way that we can recommend doing this is using Drive Genius 4 from Prosoft. Even then, HFC usually does a pretty good job of keeping things under control, but as time goes by these users may see the performance of their Macs suffer. Those people are generally creatives who use big files as their stock in trade. There is an exception to most every rule, and in this case it comes in when people have hundreds or thousands of videos, audio files, or multimedia files that are larger than about 1GB in size. For most of us, HFC performs perfectly and you may never need to defrag a Mac’s hard drive. You can think of HFC as constantly performing defragmentation, assuring that the HDD is as optimized as possible for reading and writing data. Since OS X 10.3 “Panther”, the file system has used something called Hot File Adaptive Clustering (HFC) to perform that process. There’s a reason why Macs typically don’t need defragging - the Mac OS X file system is designed differently than Microsoft’s, and it automatically defragments files. A file that may have been splattered all over the platter is placed in a contiguous band, so loading apps and files speeds up. ![]() Since the moving read/write head has to travel all over the width of the platter to load files or applications, the entire system seems to slow down.ĭefragmentation is the process of reading files, then rewriting them so that single files are written on the spinning platter in such a way that the drive head doesn’t need to move back and forth. However, the data can’t automatically migrate itself to the outer edges of the platter to fill in available space, so after a lot of reads and writes have been performed, there are small gaps where big files can’t be written, so they are stored in places all over the drive platter. As a result, new data is generally written on the outside of the platter, moving in towards the center as more data is stored over the years. As you’d expect, although the platter is rotating at a fixed rate, the outside edge of the platter is moving faster than the inside edge. HDDs use a magnetic read/write head to access a fast, rotating round platter, typically spinning at 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute. So never defrag a SSD, OK? For more background on the difference between SSDs and HDDs, check out this recent Tech 101 post on the Rocket Yard.ĭefragging is short for “defragmentation”, the process of organizing the files on a hard disk drive to optimize how it reads and writes those files. Note: SSDs do not use a spinning platter to store data instead, data is stored and accessed from flash memory. Attempting to defrag an SSD or Fusion Drive is actually dangerous to the drive, as it can reduce its lifespan. In this Tech 101, I’ll talk about why defragging is largely unnecessary on a Mac and how to do it if you’re one of the users who may need to defrag a HDD. Well, they won’t find any command or utility to let them do that on a Mac. After a few years, all computers seem to slow down somewhat, and new Mac owners might think back to the solution that they turned to on those Windows computers - defragging the hard disk drive (HDD). With sales of Macs reaching an all-time high, there are a lot of new users who are coming over from the world of Windows PCs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |