So preferably if you can contain yourself to the first 50% of a hard drive, it will perform fast forever. Also things can get out of order, the heads have to travel further all over the drive to boot or load programs for instance.Ĥ: The first 50% of the drive is faster than the second 50% due to more sectors in each track which the heads have less to move and can gather more data at one time. However data doesn't magically move up to take available space, holes can develop with a lot of reads and writes. Data is first written on the top of the drive and works it's way down. SSD's no need.Ģ: You don't need to regularly defrag a Mac's hard drive, OS X writes small files in one batch, eliminating a lot of the need to defrag a Mac regularly.ģ: Hard drives are fastest at the beginning of the drive. If you have Filevault enabled this procedure will not work because it's one giant encrypted image, this is designed to acquire it's results by copying the parts of files into one piece again and back into a alphabetical order according to the root level directory for optimal results, especially of fast loading of Applications into memory.įirst if your experiencing computer problems, backup your personal information to a storage drive first, then consult the fix it options as defragging won't necessarily solve problems in software.ġ: Only hard drives require defragging. Also it stays optimized and faster longer when defragging software tends to require it again and again to regain the performance.

I outlined a safe way here that always gives you a bootable backup to check, plus it really optimizes the hard drive in the process.

Perhaps once every few years after many updates, upgrades, program installs and reinstalls may one require it on a Mac, then rarely again. Well that's for Windows because the way it writes files it breaks them all up, OS X doesn't do that on small files, so it eliminates the need for MOST users to require a regular defrag.

You might be experiencing some performance issues with your Mac, spinning beach ball, just general slowness and you knew from your PC days about defragging computers.

How to do disk defragmentation on mac