how to defrag an external hard drive on a mac

There is no need to defrag SSDs because they have their own maintenance system known as TRIM.įragging wonderful: The truth about defragging your SSD When I renewed the experience on a recent iMac after a few months of use – recording the media files externally and no longer on the system disk – it was actually barely fragmented and I did not feel any improvement in performance after defragmentation.

I did a lot of MAO and Video Editing on my old Macbook (2008 model) and the first time I defragmented it (after four years) the speed regained was quite good (see solutions for mac too slow ). This corresponds exactly to the experience I have of defragmentation on Mac.ĭo You Need to Defragment a Mac’s Hard Drive? The users most prone to fragmentation on Mac are those who work with multimedia files – large image files, videos or sounds – regularly. The article also states that older hard drives are more prone to fragmentation, as the Mac OS X HFS Plus system automatically defragments itself through a process called Hot File Adaptive Clustering (HFC). So, users who regularly change Macs or external hard drives probably never need to defragment. The benefits of defragmentation are obviously faster access to data and therefore a gain in performance. Historically included in the operating systems of Windows, Apple does not consider it necessary to incorporate it into its OS, for good reasons as we will see. I will not explain what the cause of fragmentation of a disc is because all explanations are available online in a well-known encyclopedia. I will focus here on why and how to defrag a Mac. Indeed, there has never been a defragmentation utility in the different versions of OS X, and there is still none in Yosemite.

How to defrag an external hard drive on a mac