Speeding up an old Mac with hard drive defragmentation

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The speed up Mac tool cleans up clutter, unwanted applications, & junk data from the boot/volumes to fasten a sluggish Mac. But, this is not the case always as plenty of Apple threads, Mac forums & blogs are found overflowing with the queries of painful slow Mac OS X even after getting the hard drive cleaned with the best of speed up Mac utility. So, shall we conclude that the utility which we ran to clean the Mac is just an under-achiever? To some cases you may trust this fact but other cases of slow Mac have included a badly fragmented OS X hard drive. The old Apple machines (their hard drives) had been through infinite numbers of data 'read' and 'write' processes. Such read/write operations done on daily basis for years and so on causes the data to scatter all over the places on the Mac hard drive. This dissipated data then makes the 'head' of the hard drive to jump all those locations to return the required information and execute user’s request.

Trust this, abrupt behavior of the 'head' component accumulates more risks to the hard drives health and ascertains a possible hard drive failure.

Frequent 'Read/Write' also causes the creation of slack spaces on hard drive. Slacks are the free space that gets located between different file locations. These free spaces (slacks) remains unused by the OS to save any sort of information or files, resulting in poor Mac performance. With the passage of time & hard drive usage, more & more slacks are created almost making the hard drive go out of space even though it has free space available in the form of slacks. The treatment of slacks might not required to defrag the entire hard drive, but yes it has to be optimized with the help of a third party tool. 

If there is an external hard drive available then user don't require to get a defrag cum optimize utility to remove fragments & slacks. Simply copy the entire Mac hard drive data to the external hard drive. Format/Erase the Mac hard drive or volumes. Now copy back the data from external hard drive to original Macintosh HD. This process makes the files go back and occupy the sequentially free available space & defragmenting the entire drives content.

Else, if user don't have an external HD & no further plans to buy one then choosing a defrag Mac software is best suited and will also be a cheap affair in comparison to buying an external HD.

Some measures one must apply pre & post defragmentation:

1. Use uninterrupted power supply so that no sudden event can disrupt the defragmentation process. Power supply to the desktop, notebook Macs should be up to the mark. A power interrupt can shut down the Mac & invite a bigger problem in the name of data loss while defragging the drive.


2. Though hard drive defragmentation is a normal process but one must appropriately back up everything or at least the most needed data. Software vendors will assure to scan a healthy hard drive but in case of presence of bad sectors or other hard drive issues no one can make a guarantee. Due to presence of any hard drive issue the defrag utility may not be able to do the complete scan of the drive resulting in closing the process in mid-way.


3. If no circumstances whatsoever, never attempt to defrag a SSD connected with the Mac. In any case you proceed with defragmentation; it will shorten the life span of the solid state drive.


4. Without a bootable DVD of the OS X, you won't be able to defrag the system start-up volume. 

Make sure your Mac doesn't have a fragmented hard drive or volumes which is causing miserable experience with your Mac system. In case you have then do arrange your resource (an external HD or a Mac defrag tool, which one is available) to kill the fragments and add hard drives life to many more years.