![]() It works well, and is simple to customize by defining how many minutes of inactivity the Mac should wait for before quitting or hiding an app (see screenshot below). I use a free utility from developer Marco Arment called “Quitter” to automatically shut down apps that I haven’t used in a certain amount of time. To quit those apps, just right-click the icon and select “Quit”. To see which apps are running, look for a dot below the app icon in the Dock. If many applications are running at one time and you’re not using them all, consider quitting the unused apps. While fragmented HDDs are often the cause of performance slowdowns on Macs, there are other reasons a Mac might be sluggish. What Else Could Be Causing A Mac To Run Slowly? It also has other uses like creating a secondary drive so that the main drive can be defragged and optimized, finding and eliminating duplicate files, performing secure erasure of drives, and cloning drives. (Drive Genius 5 – note that the current boot drive can’t be defragged.)ĭrive Genius 5 is used by Apple employees at the Genius Bars and Genius Groves at Apple retail stores, so it’s highly regarded in the industry. Note that the utility does not work with APFS-formatted drives, but as noted in the previous section of this article, APFS includes an automatic defragging capability. The solution is to use Drive Genius 5 from Prosoft Engineering (see image below). Those creatives we talked about earlier can regain performance by defragging those large HDDs filled with big files, but Apple does not build a defragging utility into macOS. For HDDs - which as of publication are currently not supported with APFS - the new file system will provide automatic defragmentation in background when your Mac is idle. Never defrag an SSD!Īs of the release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra in September of 2017, some Macs now use a totally different file system called APFS (Apple File System) to replace the old HFS+ file system that had been in place for decades. Defragging an SSD or Fusion Drive (which is a combination of an SSD and a HDD) can actually be dangerous to the drive and reduce its lifespan. An SSD uses flash memory to store data rather than spinning mechanical platters. More and more Macs are doing away with Hard Disk Drives and using solid-state drives - SSDs - for data storage. HFC still does a very good job of keeping the files unfragmented, but as time passes this type of user may see a performance hit. Generally, these people are creatives who use a lot of big files in their work. The exception is for those Mac users who have hundreds or thousands of very large files (usually audio or video files) larger than 1GB in size. HFC works very well for most users and as a result, most users should never need to defrag a Mac hard drive. Think of HFC as constantly performing defragmentation on hard disk drives, ensuring that the HDD is always as optimized as possible for reading and writing data. Since the days of Mac OS X “Panther” (which shipped in 2003), Mac OS X and its successor macOS have used something called Hot File Adaptive Clustering (HFC) to automatically defragment files. Why Macs Usually Don’t Need to be Defragged The result? Faster loading of apps and data. This slows down operation.ĭefragmentation reads the files on the HDD platters, then rewrites them on the platters so single files are written contiguously and the drive head doesn’t need to move back and forth as much. As a result, those files are stored in locations all over the drive platters and the moving read/write head must travel the complete width of the platter to load files. ![]() Data can’t automatically migrate itself to the outer edges of the platters to fill in available space, so after many read/write cycles have been completed, there are gaps where large files cannot be written. New data is generally written to the outside of the platters, with the read/write heads moving in toward the center as more data is stored. HDDs use a magnetic read/write head to access rotating round platters that usually spin at either 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute (see image above right). In this article, we’ll discuss why defragging Mac HDDs is usually unnecessary and how to do it if you’re one of the few users who may actually benefit from the process.ĭefragging is a slang term for “defragmentation”, which is the process of organizing files on a HDD to optimize how it accesses those files. Like all computers, Macs tend to slow down a bit after a few years of usage, and those readers who are new to the Mac might think that the old Windows solution of “defragging the hard disk drive” (HDD) might help. Macs are more popular than ever, thanks to a “halo effect” from buyers of iPhones and iPads who decide to make the switch from Windows to macOS.
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