Overview

Stellar Drive Defrag is a system tool to defragment one or more hard drives used on a Macintosh computer.

Files are not saved all in one place, but actually are broken up into small segments and saved throughout a hard drive. This can be for several reasons including lack of available space in one location at the time the file was first saved.

A defragmentation tool like Stellar Drive Defrag is designed to re-allocate the available space by moving around the file fragments to eventually be much closer together. This helps to speed up the loading process and reduce the access time for frequently used files especially. With this software, the process also supports defragmenting an encrypted disk volume which is very useful.

Space is allocated within the software as unused space, fragmented, allocation and overflow. Meta data files can also be defragged.

A bootable DVD can be created that can be used to defrag the bootable partition. The Mac OS Lion version requires a DMGK file to help with this process (see the developer's link), but Mountain Lion versions fully support this feature.

Installation

The installation completed without any issues.

There was no adware, toolbars, spyware or malware included in the setup package.

Stellar Drive Defrag requires Mac OS X. The Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite is also supported.

Interface

When optimizing, the main defrag application window shows all the accessible drives down the left-hand side with large icons depicting hard drives, optical drives, etc. The type of drive is labeled as well as its total capacity.

There is a drop-down list in the top-left corner where the Mac user can select command choices like Defrag MetaData, Quick Defrag, Full Defrag, and Optimize. To the right of this area are large colorful buttons for "Optimize," "Stop," "Defrag Files," and "Legend."

Below this area is the sector chart showing the current device / partition being defragged. There are two button selectors at the top for "Layout" and "Files" which can be clicked on to change the view. Clear blocks are shown in green whereas fragmented blocks are shown in deep red. The Files tab will display the individual file names and even how many fragments are present at an individual file level. Pretty impressive.

Pros

• Drive defragmentation tool for the Macintosh
• Scan drives to determine the level of defragmentation
• Defragment metadata as well as drives
• Four methods of defragmentation

Cons

• None.

Alternatives

iDefrag is a commercial defragmentation tool that has been updated several times over the years.

Conclusion

Stellar Drive Defrag is a useful defragmentation tool for the Mac that can defrag metadata files as well as whole drives.