Even spinning disks have gotten faster with multiple heads and really quick seek time. With SSD's, the seek time has been essentially negated, so you don't pay that penalty for looking all over the drive for your data. If the drive had to jump all over the place for the data, then you'd have delays in getting the data and thus buffering issues and choppy video playback.įast-forward to today, machines today have minimal 8GB of memory or more.

If the data was all located near each other, the speed in which you got the data would allow for smooth playback.

The video player couldn't keep very much of the video in memory, so it would constantly have to go back to the disk to read more and more and buffer a little bit for smooth playback. Think about a system that has say 2 or 4GB of memory, and you were try to load a 600 or 1GB video file to play. This was a very prevalent thing hyped up by software makers as a way to increase performance, so a lot of marketing dollars went into that.īack in the day with slower CPU speeds, slower IO speeds and spinning disks, having the reading head of the HDD seek all over the platter for your data was indeed a potential bottleneck if you were trying to read something in a very sustained fashion. Let’s get into how to identify whether a Mac is a good candidate or not.With current computers and their overall performance, defragmenting is not necessary at all. But, again, not all Macs need to be defragged. There can be a few reasons why a Mac could be slow, but defragging may help. In general, it’s a good idea to defrag Macs or PCs with HDDs about once a month. Defragging also restores unusable capacity by reducing the space wasted between saved data. This unsystematic storage also creates spaces between saved data on the disk that aren’t usable, reducing storage capacity.ĭefragmenting basically reorders the data on the hard disk and bunches those bits together, making it faster and more efficient to access save files.

This creates inefficiency, as the mechanical arm accessing a file must move to multiple sectors to collect the various bits of data a computer needs to read and open it. Over time, the data for a saved file becomes fragmented, meaning parts of the file are stored on different sectors of the disk. Hard disk drives (HDDs) store data on a spinning platter that’s divided into sectors.

How to defragment a mac computer