The Mac Operating system is technically the programmer’s choice in the most moderate words. Mac OS gives you the freedom and relief regarding defragmenting of the hard drive. In Microsoft’s Windows operating system, defragmentation of the hard drive is routinely required task which is urgent and necessary for the better and smooth performance and speed of your laptop or desktop computers. Before going in details and features of Mac, a brief introduction defragmentation would be helpful for the readers and students.
What is Defragmentation?
Defragmentation is an automated process that locates the non-contiguous fragments of your data in the hard drive into which a computer/ system file is stored that may be divided and the fragments being re-arranged and restored them into few fragments or into the complete file. In simpler words, every deletion of a in your hard drive is marked with a “space available”. With the deletion of more and more files from different destinations or storage place, these spaces remain scattered and unorganized until being defragmented. The saving of large files into fragments or parts is fragmentation.
Although, solid state drives and most of the operating system either don’t need to be defragmented or you don’t have the permission to defragment them. This talk is about the traditional hard drives with spinning platters. In the case of Windows, defragmentation is a usual and easy task to be done. Windows have converted to NTFS file system after the size or volume of the hard drives have reached from Gigabytes to Terabytes.
This extraordinary shift has actually become a paradigm shift in the world of information and communication technology. If you have Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 9 or even Windows 10, all of them have a brilliant feature of automatically defragment the hard drives after given intervals. This is a regularly scheduled defragmentation and you don’t have worry much.
Even all operating systems suffer from some level of fragmentation which is very much important for their file systems to handle and manage. Instead of saving multiple files on the hard drive near one another, theses files are scattered everywhere on the hard drive.
In Windows, unlike older FAT and FAT32 files systems, NTFS file system automatically process defragmentation with regular intervals. However, defragmentation process on NTFS files system is a slower and patience testing process. Windows 10 runs the defragmenting process in the background automatically.
Defragmentation and Mac:
Mac users are free of this headache. Why is Mac free of this problem? The simple answer to this question is that Mac uses totally a different file system and all the Macs have solid state drives nowadays. Since solid state drives don’t need defragmentation, so Macs do not need defragmentation. Also, Macs using older versions of hard drives with spinning platters, they also don’t need defragmentation either. Macs use HFS and APFS file systems which automatically run defragmentation process on the hard drives.
Macs use the Hot File Adaptive Clustering system including on-the-fly defragmentation. Mac OS leave the spaces for saved files for the further expansion of these saved files.
