When we use the Mac repeatedly, over time we can see that its performance has been gradually decreased. Few solutions are offered to this, although those that can be offered to us are quite effective. One of them is defragmentation of the Mac to improve its performance. In this post, we show you how to do it.
If you start searching from your own device to defragment, you will see that there is no utility that gives us access to it, so perhaps you can end up abandoning and settling for the performance your Mac is having. This is because This practice within the Mac is done automatically. However, when the need to do so explodes due to a slowdown in Mac performance, do so every few years.
Why defragment your Mac?
To begin, we must understand that defragmentation is nothing more than a reorganization of the data on your Mac drive to put them in the correct order, which ultimately produces an improvement in the speed of our system. It should be noted that a Mac that has the OS X version later than 10.2 does not need this practice because they do a process of cleaning the fragmented files that are on our hard drive. Also, you should know that if your Mac has an SSD (also known as a flash drive), defragmentation can damage it, so you may have to rethink whether it really is worth doing.
Unless you need it very urgently, you probably don’t need to defragment your Mac. It is also not recommended that if you have a version of macOS High Sierra or Mojave and have changed your file system to Apple‘s newer APFS format, perform the Defragmentation is also not highly recommended.
When is it recommended to defragment my Mac?
The time when we may need to use defragmentation will be when our hard drive contains less than 10% free storage since at this point, your hard drive cannot do automatic defragmentation. This can happen to us when we store a large number of large files, as is the case with multimedia professionals. If you are one of those who regularly save files of more than 1 Gb on your computer, we recommend that before having to need defragmentation, make use of an external hard drive to store those files.
Another reason why you may need to defragment it is if your Mac contains a traditional hard drive that contains mechanical parts since disks with moving parts can slow down if files are highly fragmented.
How to defragment my Mac
If once you have weighed all the pros and cons of defragmentation, you have decided to do it, you should know that there are some tools on the market that will make this practice somewhat easier. Some of them, due to the change in APFS file system, became obsolete and were not developed again. The ones we recommend are the following:
Drive Genius 5
This tool will show you the fragmentation level of your disk and later offer you a defragmentation recommendation or simply a reorganization of your files. You should bear in mind that if you use macOS 10.13 or later, the utilities offered by this program are not compatible with APFS.
It contains an intuitive user interface, with which it will be much easier for you to keep your Mac clean and to its maximum performance. The latest version of Drive Genius includes 19 fully automated utilities that make you forget to perform any type of process manually. In addition, a very curious fact is that these utilities start working when you are not using the system, so you will not notice a slowdown. Some of the 19 named functions are:
- Search for heavy or duplicate files.
- Performance optimization.
- Drive Pulse, which allows you to identify any type of malware while you are idle.
- Performance monitoring and detection of problems related to hardware.
- Boot Weel, which provides a secondary boot drive to more easily repair the primary disk.
To use this tool we must follow the following steps:
- For starters, in the information tab, you must make sure that your disk really has a problem that makes it impossible for it to perform correctly.
- Later and in case you need it, you must go to the defragment tab and select the disk you want to perform between processes.
- Within this tab, the percentage of fragmentation that the disk has will be shown in a graphic way.
- Once you have checked all the above, at the bottom right, you will find the Start button. Clicking there will start defragmentation automatically.
- Previously, the software itself will warn you of the consequences that this practice can have on your disk. In this tab, Drive Genius will give you two options. The first will be to defragment without checking the disk and the second will be to do it by checking. We recommend the latter.
Additionally, in the configuration tab, the software allows you to indicate the weight of the large files to be deleted and the maximum days in which certain files have not been accessed. It also allows us to remove duplicate files. All this, in order to remove from your Mac all those files that are a burden on your computer.
Techtool Pro 11
Techtool does not recommend use for SSDs and does not support fragmentation on AFPS volumes, although it is capable of defragmenting individual files on the hard drive. In addition this system is also compatible with Mojave. In addition, it is a correct monitoring tool for the good condition of your Mac. This software is capable of detecting possible problems on your computer and constantly fixing these problems.
Some of the tools included in this TechTool Pro are:
- Optimize files and volumes.
- Backup data through duplicate volumes generated by TechTool itself.
- Rebuild the cache in order to improve the boot of your Mac and overall performance.
- Repair damaged directories and corrupt hard drives.
This tool, like Drive Genius 5, is a paid tool.
Do it for free
One of the best options to make an improvement in the performance of your Mac and the safest, is to perform a backup with Time Machine and perform a clean installation of the operating system. This could be the most reliable option due to the low recommendation that we make of this practice, because as we have already indicated above, it could harm your equipment, in addition to that through constant care in the files and responsible storage, either on your own Mac or on an external hard drive, it will avoid us having to get to this point in future occasions.
Find out in time what is going wrong
Before having to reach the point of defragmentation, it is recommended that we monitor the health of our Mac and its activity, to systematically check that everything is going well. For this, there are certain tools included in the Mac such as Activity Monitor that allows us to check what it is using excessively to the CPU and therefore, it is reducing its performance. Another option is the Disk Utility that will allow us to see if there are any associated problems.
