For more details, you can refer to the previous article – “ Why You Should Never Defrag Solid State Drive (SSD)?“ It’s unnecessary and even harmful to defrag a SSD, such as leading to file corruption like Outlook corruption. Last but not least, multiple modern Mac comes with solid state drive (SSD).If so, Mac will auto defragment the file. Besides, when you open a file, Mac OS will auto check if it is divided into more than 8 fragments.In the process of moving files, Mac OS will defragment them. Mac OS is designed to undertake “Hot File Adaptive Clustering” (HFC), which is a task to monitor frequently-accessed files and move them to a specific hot zone on the booting drive.That is to say, even if a file is separated into fragments, Mac OS has auto defragmented them. Mac OS has native features to dynamically gather the small file pieces together and then automatically collect them into a large enough space on the drive.

In this way, the space is totally sufficient for storing the file, thus avoiding fragmenting the file. When a new file is written to the Mac drive, the drive’s Hierarchical File System (HFS) will find the larger free space to store the file, instead of using the recently freed space on the drive.It’s because Mac OS is able to automatically organize and defragment the files. Actually, defragging is not an essential task in Mac.

So, many users wonder if it is necessary to defrag their Macs’ drives. And even Disk Utility doesn’t provide this feature. However, in Mac, you cannot find such a tool. Then, in the subsequent dialog box, you can find a “Defragment now” button on “Tools” tab. You can right click on the drive and then choose “Properties”. In Windows, there is a direct tool for defragging. Hence, you can defrag the drive, which will gather the file pieces together, thereby improving the drive performance greatly. In this situation, generally, when you try to access a file, the drive heads have to work around the platters to locate all the file pieces, which may take a pretty long time. More specifically, on hard drive, files are always split into pieces and scattered across the platters. “Disk Defragmentation” is a feature responsible for organizing the files on a hard drive together so as to optimize the performance of data access. Then, is it also significant for Macs? In other words, it is necessary for you to defrag the Mac drive? Now, this article will focus on this question and expose the answer. Defragmentation is a common and vitally essential maintenance tool in Windows.

Defrag mac drive