Speed up your Mac

I have an old MacBook and I haven't had any serious problems with it, so I'll carry on using it as long as I can. A minor irritation though, is that it is getting slower and slower as it gets older. It is a common problem and old computers, no matter which operating system they are running, never run as fast as they used to when they were new. However, I managed to speed up my Mac and it is now twice as fast at starting up, starting applications and opening files. And it didn't cost me anything.

What I did was to plug in an external USB disk drive and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an identical copy of the Mac's internal disk drive on the external one. It's a free utility.

I then booted up from the USB drive (hold down the Option key when starting the Mac to choose the disk drive or partition to boot from). Using Disk Utility I formatted the Mac's internal disk drive and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the USB disk back to the Mac's internal drive. After a couple of boots to allow it to settle down the Mac's startup time is now about half what it was. It boots up really quickly and apps start much faster.

So I cloned the internal disk to an external one then cloned it back. Nothing changed, all the files are the same, nothing was deleted, and everything is exactly as it was before. So what is different and how come it is faster?

The answer is fragmentation. File fragmentation is well known on Windows PCs and Windows has a built in disk defragmenter. There are many third party utilities too. If you want to boost the speed of an old Windows PC or keep a new one running smoothly you run the disk defragmenter.

Apple does not provide a disk defragmenter with OS X and the popular view among Mac users is that Mac's don't suffer from fragmentation. Only Windows users suffers from fragmentation, they laugh. Well they couldn't be more wrong. OS X does indeed perform some disk housekeeping tasks to optimise the disk drive (as does Windows), but it is inadequate and file fragmentation builds up over time and it slows down the Mac.

When the disk is cloned to a blank destination disk all the files are written one after the other. A file that is fragmented on the source disk is written to the destination as a contiguous file in one piece with no fragments. This is why copying the disk to a USB drive, formatting and copying it back speeds up the Mac. All the files are defragmented. Try it if you have an old Mac.