5 Tips to Optimize Slow Mac Hard Drive

Mac hard drive freezing too often? All processes on OS X are taking forever time to execute, crashing and running painfully slow? It's high time to look into the matter and start Mac hard drive optimization in order to speed up Mac. In this instructable I am going to share 5 tips that can help you eliminates the sluggishness of your Mac disk.

[Note: the below steps aren't in an order. You may apply any one or multiple steps depending upon the condition and factors that affect your Mac disk performance].

1. Cleanup Mac
2. Uninstall / Update Old Apps
3. Monitor / Repair Mac Disk
4. Defrag Mac Drive
5. Wipe Mac OS

Third Party Solution

To ease up Mac hard drive optimization and reduce human effort, it is advised to opt for a utility that can perform Mac hard disk optmization in matter of few hours. Stellar Speedup Mac Platinum Edition is a recommended utility for this purpose.

[Note: With the help of this Mac optmization utility, you can get rid of below infamous errors that bother a Mac user]

1. Your startup disk is almost full
2. Invalid B tree node structure/size
3. Invalid b count
4. Invalid directory item count

Perhaps, this is the simplest activity to optimize Mac since you need to select the junk files and send them to trash. This may require some effort because you need to explore the entire 500GB < Mac hard drive to identify and collect the garbage data for removal. Please don't forget to empty the trash once all the junks have been dispatched to it.

Outcome of cleaning up Mac hard drive intensively are mostly fruitful because the OS X require free spaces to perform better. It is said that your Mac hard drive must have 10% of the free spaces w.r.t to its size. However, I would recommend having at-least 15% of free spaces on your disk.

Caution: Please very careful of the files which you are removing from the OS X in order to gain free spaces. It is quite a common scenario when an important file(s) are trashed in mistaken identity. Backup your Mac before cleaning up the hard drive.

How uninstalling old apps from Mac hard drive will optimize the performance of OS X? To some extent it will since uninstalling a malicious or bogus app will certainly help you remove the disease from the Mac disk. Even if an application doesn't possess a threat to your Mac, you must identify its worthiness on occupying the precious hard drive storage spaces. If the app isn't used at all, then it must be dispatched to the trash folder.

Updating an app is the most productive activity that you must perform for Mac optimization. Remember a software update resolved bugs and issues of an app and updating the application would help OS X get rid of the related issues caused by an app.

It is time now to locate villains on your Mac hard drive and by villains I am referring to the bad sectors and directory corruption on your Mac disk. With the help of holy Disk Utility, you can run a free repair of the hard drive in order to hunt disk errors. Congratulations, if the Disk Utility gives you back the message "The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK". However, you must buckle up if the message flashed by disk utility is of a concern "Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files"

To repair a Mac hard drive that isn't fixed by the Disk Utility, you first arrange the hard drive backup and later reformat the disk using the Disk Utility.

However, bad sectors aren't that easy to handle since they are physical in nature. Salvage the data from a bad disk using hard drive imaging and reformat / replace the hard drive.

Defrag doesn't belongs to Mac OS X club? It simply doesn't since OS X in built functionality allows easy defragging of files having size up to 20MB. The need for Mac defragging arrives when the hard drive is manipulated to handle large files and cumbersome utilities such as video editors, maps etc. These large files are accessed (read / write /edit / save) on number of occasions causing chunks of fragments between them. These fragments causes delays whenever a file is accessed by the OS X since the file information is collected from different locations on the Mac disk.

Solution - 3 steps

1. Back Macintosh HD with Time Machine
2. Reformat the Mac hard drive
3. Restore Mac from Time Machine disk

Don't miss this Instructables

How to Recover Backup Files Deleted from Time Machine

Wiping Mac hard drive and reinstalling the OS X seems to be a legit activity for Mac hard drive optimization. Wiping the Mac will eliminate the slowness and sluggishness of the Mac and a fresh reinstallation would make it run better than before. Don't forget to take full Mac backup with the Time Machine before reformatting / wiping Mac hard disk drive. Once done, go into recovery mode (press Command + R before startup) and select the very first option that states, "Restore from Time Machine Backup".

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Do let me know your thoughts on Optimizing your Mac OS X