Defragging your Mac is so 1980s

Posted on December 20, 2008
Filed Under Apple, Software | 1 Comment

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I came back from a long walk around Kingston-upon-Thames earlier and thought about the performance of my Mac and said to myself I have never defragged the hard drive since I bought the machine a few years back. I thought should I attempt to do a defrag on a Saturday afternoon.

If I want to defrag then which reliable utility should I use. As usual when in doubt, the best thing to do is to Google and guess what. Defragging your Mac hard drive is a thing of the past, like shoulder pads and hair mousse! That is because of the way the OS X operating system manages files.

The system optimizes itself after a system update of installation of a new application but you can still run a defrag utility to defrag your Mac’s hard drive if you wish to. It could take up to several hours and you may not see any significant performance improvements.

Here are some useful tips I learnt about OS X.

1) OS X automatically defrags files that are less than 20 megabytes.
2) If you make it a habit to periodically clear your Mac’s various caches, including those associated with your Internet browser, it can also help speed up your machine.

Are there other option besides defragging?

Yes, you can reformat our hard drive. That’s a crude method but remember to backup all your documents and files before you attempt anything that involves the word format!