The earlier HFS and HFS+ both used a block-based (Extent) design, where each block contains a serial number and a contiguous segment of storage space, and this allocation looks for several contiguous blocks in the file system to provide the space needed.īoth Linux and macOS have block-based file systems, and the disk space allocation is relatively reasonable, so there are no fragmented disks on Windows systems.

Most of today’s macOS uses the APFS file system, which is Apple’s file system optimized specifically for devices such as solid-state drives.

Unlike Windows, which stores multiple files consecutively, Linux scatters files to different parts of the disk, leaving some space between files to ensure that they are not fragmented when modified or updated. Linux generally uses Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4 file systems, with most Linux distributions today opting for Ext4. Solid-state drives have different characteristics than mechanical drives, and defragmentation may not only not significantly help improve read and write performance, but also be detrimental to the life of the hardware.Linux and macOS use file systems that either reduce the probability of fragmentation or implement automatic defragmentation features.Linux and macOS systems do not need defragmentation for the opposite reasons that Windows needs defragmentation. Windows operating systems may need to defragment their disks every once in a while, and there are two reasons behind this problem: one is that Windows uses a very simple file system called FAT, which is designed in such a way that the same files may be scattered in different locations on the disk, and the other is that solid state drives were not popular in the ancient times and mechanical hard drives have poor random read and write performance. From personal experience, the author has not defragmented a disk in macOS for the past seven or eight years, and you won’t find any related operations in today’s disk tools, only the diskutil command to set whether a disk is defragmented on or off. I believe that many software engineers today use Linux or macOS systems, and unlike Windows, we hardly see the concept of disk defragmentation.

Defrag mac drive