If you want really zippy improvements, you'll need to install a solid state hard drive and as much RAM as your computer will hold. My Mac was not super slow before the defrag. This is a very unscientific test, but it seems that I at least gained some reboot time after defragmenting my hard drive.

Timed how long it took my Mac to reboot on the third reboot = 1:08.

Used Time Machine to backup my newly defragmented hard drive.

Rebooted my Mac a couple of times because iDefrag said after a defrag, the Mac needs to rebuild some things.

Ran iDrefrag, using the full defrag option, which took about 16 hours.

Timed how long it took my Mac to reboot = 1:30.

Once my hard drive was good to go according to OS X's apps, I used Time Machine to back it up again.

Used OS X's disk utility to repair the hard drive because errors were found on it.

Used OS X's disk utility app to repair permissions on my hard drive.

Which made me want to defrag my Mac, so I did.įirst, I bought the iDefrag app.

So I looked online to see what people thought, and most people thought it was unnecessary to defrag a Mac. Yesterday I felt compelled to give it a checkup. My current Mac is an early 2008 MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, with an upgraded 7200 RPM 500 GB hard drive that I installed several years ago. I was always told that Macs maintain themselves well enough to not require the user to defragment a Mac hard drive. I have only ever owned Macs, and I have never tried defragmenting a Mac hard drive before.

How to defragment disk on mac