Symptoms of a Fragmented Mac Hard Drive

No one can deny the fact that Mac hard drives are less prone to fragmentation than Windows, but we cannot say that Mac’s never get fragmented. Like any other hard drive Mac too gets fragmented over time, but its inbuilt safeguards defragment it time to time and never let you fell that it too needs defragmentation. However, situations arise when these inbuilt defragmentation features too fail to do any needful. These situations are cluttered hard drive that has less that 10% free space and big amount of large files like video files on your disk make it fragmented. In such situations, wherein your Mac becomes fragmented, it starts showing questioning behaviors like:

• Overall Performance Degradation: The very first symptom of fragmented hard drive is performance degradation. Your Mac becomes really very slow, even the extraction of small file or saving a file starts taking too much time. This is because the OS X has to wander around the hard drive in search of spread portions of the file that you want to access and has to divide a file to save at different locations spread all over. Moreover, keeping track on all these fragments of a file and maintaining the link between them also decreases overall machine performance.

• Unexpected Program Failure: In order to keep track for all the fragmented portions of large number of files (files here is for both programs and data), your Mac OS X may abruptly close a program. Though occasional program failures can be tolerated, but if this behavior is repeated by your OS X regularly, then this shows that it is fragmented heavily.

• System Errors: Though this is not the major symptom and rarely occurs, but at times the file system of your Mac too gets corrupt due to fragments. Since file system corruption results in system errors, you may find this behavior as well with your fragmented Mac.

Therefore, if you encounter any such symptoms, then use of an efficient drive defrag software is recommended. Since most of these tools have very intuitive user interface and simple steps, they are easy to use. Hence with the help of a reliable drive defrag tool you can improve the data access speed and overall performance of your machine. Moreover, effective tool optimizes all the free space available on your hard drive and make it a contiguous large space, and thus removes the free space fragmentation as well.

Guest article written by: Jyoti Kumari is a Mac user and believes in making life better with latest and useful technology in Mac. Want to share ideas and research on Mac utilities to [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]Defragment Mac[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]Defragment Mac[/tp] and optimize Mac drive.