I still remember routine when I was a child, carefully learned through my father's habits. From time to time, from time to time, you had to Defraction The family's PC disc. It was something that Windows did not ask for explicitly, but which optimized its performance. I remember very well these afternoons in which we saw how the fault championships moved to the interface. It was hypnotizing.
But when I made the mac jump, this custom was lost. If this process was so good, why didn't Mac had? Suddenly, I came across an operating system that had no failure of my own disc, and I started to fear being able to harm the performance of the system over the months. But no, it was and it is One of the advantages of macos: it was not necessary to defragment your album. And now much less with Sequoia MacOS.
What is the defragment and what is it for
In IT terms, a defraction an album was The equivalent of ordering a part which was made a disaster. As we use an operating system, it is data writing where there is free space on the mechanical hard drive. If, for example, we want to write 2 MB of data, the system was looking for a “hole” of 2 MB on the disc.
This means that any hole below 2 MB has been ignored, leaving small areas of free space. Or these areas have been used, writing this 2 MB file in parts. Consequence: reading this file meant examining all of these “hollows” causing more reading efforts on the disk and more slowly on the computer.
Defraction The album involved Get rid of all the “holes” with free space And join a single block of data all these files that have been saved in many. It was a process of several hours, depending on the amount of data on the computer. If it was done regularly, the general performance of the computer was optimized and the hard drive had to operate less, gaining longevity.
Why have we never needed to defragment the album of a Mac
In the past, there were third part applications to hit the albums of a Mac.
The reason why in MacOS, we never had to bother their hard drives lies in the format of these albums. While Windows used FAT32 or NTFS, Apple used a format called HFS + (or MacOS Plus) that has not divided any data block into different parts To fill these small “hollows” with a free space.
Consequently, the Mac discs were not fragmented as much as the windows and benefited from greater optimization over the years. This fragmentation was only accentuated if the hard drive was very full. And yet Apple did not offer any official request To do this deragmentation.
Now, for these folk fans, there was a third game tool to make a defraged album from the Mac album.
Do not consider the defraction of your Mac: it is no longer necessary
If after reading all of this, you are already planning to hit the album of your Mac to gain performance, Hold. Deframent a Mac album in 2024 makes no sense. The reason is simple: Now all Macs use SSD discswho does not fragment their information when writing data. Deframent an album was made with hard mechanical discs, but not with the current fleas which are now.
If you want to take care of your Mac now, the only thing you should worry about is not too full. If from time to time, you eliminate the files you do not need, by releasing space, keep the data from iCloud Drive Well synchronized and uninstall the applications you stop using, you will have a Mac that will work as the first day for years.
An old version of this article was initially published on 02/25/2024.
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