As a PC user it was a bit confusing at first to realise that Mac OS did not have a defragmentation application! I could not imagine that a hard disk did not need a ‘cleaning-up’ once in a while.
When I tell my 'PC-using' friends that defrag is not needed on a Mac, they look at me in disbelieve. A response often heard is “so there is no defrag utility build into the Mac OS, but that does not mean it doesn’t need it…”
Who am I to argue this statement? Maybe they are right?
So: "Do I need to defrag my Mac?" a search on internet results in many users saying “you don’t need to defrag a Mac”. That’s way to simple a conclusion, right? Some arguments people!
A Friend of mine who has far more experience with the Mac OS than me, told me that the way Macs partition hard drives is in a format that has built-in algorithms to prevent fragmentation. You don't need to defrag on an HFS+ partition (Mac OS) because the file system defrags itself on file accesses so you don’t require an external defragmenter. He also told me that OSX automatically defragments files under 20Mb, and that since these normally are 99.9% of the files on your HD, it's pointless to defrag the rest… I believe him!
Anyway: let me tell you something about fragmentation. An operating system uses a disk drive in a certain way so the drive's storage space appears as a logically contiguous sequence of blocks. The drive is unfragmented if all its content resides in contiguous blocks, and fragmented if the space between the blocks is to small to store new files.
“Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes (Mac OS) should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile, in most cases, because the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation.” See for full article: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/
So does this mean that FAT32 & NTFS, (the partition format of PC’s) is bad? Maybe these file systems are also good, but the users a so used to defrag, they keep on doing it.
However I must say, my experience with de file system on PC’s in combination with defrag was always good. Meaning is was useful to do once in a while and made the OS faster and the physical drives less noisy.
I am glad not to worry about this since I use a Mac.
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The statement stays true untill you have smalll sized files in your machine. It happens with professionals that they save large sized files whose fragmentation cannot be handled HFS+ also. There comes the need of third party tools like Stellar Drive Defrag.
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