How To Clean Mac Hard Drive Free

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You may find that your Mac runs slower and slower than it's new, or you may need to sell or trade your Mac for something new. In this case it'd be a good idea to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system to make your Mac clean like a new one as well as to protect your privacy. You must don't want any one to access your private information after you sell your Mac. To wipe the hard drive completely can avoid your personal data being recovered.

Part 1. How to Tell the Type of Your Hard Drive

Before you start to wipe your Mac hard drive, you should firstly confirm whether you have a HDD or SSD. You can find it out by the method below. Click on the Apple menu and select 'About this Mac', then select the Storage option to see which type of drive is in your system.

2020 FACTORY RESET MAC: SUSCRIBE: this video we'll learn how to clean a mac!music: Fresh & Fun by Mid.

The good news is that freeing up storage space on a Mac is something anyone can do. Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to clean up your Mac hard drive and also improve its overall performance. Finding Large Files. One of the quickest ways to fill up your Mac hard drive is having too many large files. Best Feature: Clean Mac’s hard drive. The Parallels Toolbox offers a variety of tools to clean junk files from Mac. The makers also state that the software will “ Keep your Mac clutter-free and running at max speed.” It offers a clean interface for the user using which the user can delete and clean the Mac in one go. You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER! With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space. If it does, it's time for some hard drive. How to Clean Mac Hard Drive Manually. If you never performed an automatic or manual system cleaning — it means that your Mac. Nov 25, 2020 How to clean a hard drive. Here we go through the steps you need to take in order to clear your hard drive on both Windows and Mac machines. How to Clean your hard drive on Windows. If you're a Windows user, you can follow along with the steps below to clean up your hard drive.

For example, the hard drive of my Mac is a SATA Disk (HDD).

If your hard drive is a Solid State SATA Drive (SSD), it will look like this.

Part 2. Back up Important Data before Wiping Hard Drive

It's necessary to make a backup of all the important data in your hard drive before you completely wipe it. Even though you decide to sell your Mac, it would be a wise decision to back up your important information in case you still need them later in the future.

To make a backup of your Mac data, the built-in Time Machine backup software in Mac OS X/11 can do you a great favor.

Check how to back up your Mac with Time Machine in details.

Step 1. Open Apple Menu > System Preferences and select Time Machine icon in the System Preferences folder.

Step 2. Check Back Up Automatically and click Select Disk button in the top-middle of the window.

Step 3. Choose the disk you want to use to save your backup data. It would be better to plug in an external hard drive to save the copy of all the data you want to back up.

Tip: It's necessary to back up your computer regularly even if you didn't plan to wipe your hard drive, in case your Mac computer crashes suddenly or goes through other accident. And if you don't want to use Time Machine, you can also use iCloud or other cloud storage service to store all your important files online.

How to Wipe a Mac Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Step 1: Turn off your Mac.

Step 2: Press the power button and hold down the command and R keys at the same time immediately.

Step 3: Wait until the Apple logo appears on the screen.

Step 4: Select the 'Disk Utility' from the OS X Utilities list. Click Continue.

Step 5: Select the disk you want to wipe by clicking it on the sidebar. Then click the Erase button at the bottom of the window.

Please note that the Erase option can only be clickable after you boot up your Mac with command +R keys. It won't be clickable if you attempt to reformat your hard drive after starting your computer as you normally would.

Step 6: Click the Security Options button and determine how thoroughly you want to erase your hard drive with a slider bar.

There are four erasing levels ranging from the fastest to the slowest. If you choose the fastest option, it will take a short time to wipe drive but it's not secure enough, because the data may not be removed thoroughly and could be restored with a recovery application. And if you choose the slowest option, the erasing process will be much longer but it will erase the maximal amount of data for you.

You can choose the erasing level according to your need and click OK after you make the decision. Then click the Erase button to begin the hard drive wiping process.

Part 4. How to Erase a Mac SSD with Apeaksoft Mac Cleaner

Not like older Mac computers with a traditional hard disk drive, most newer MacBooks are equipped with solid state drives (SSDs), and in this case Apple's Disk Utility software does not enable you to wipe the hard drive. What's the reason? In fact, just a standard erase can make it difficult to do a Mac data recovery. Another reason is that wiping an SSD out will damage your hard drive, and over time, the reliability and longevity of your SSD will be affected. Therefore, we do not recommend you to wipe a Mac with SSD completely with method mentioned in Part 3.

However, you can make a standard erase of your Mac SSD to clean your Mac safely and monitor its system performance. In this case, Apeaksoft Mac Cleaner can do you a good favor. Mac Cleaner is an all-in-one app to erase all the junk files on your Mac and optimize your Mac.

Features:

• Erase any junk/old/large files, clutter, shred files securely on your Mac hard drive.

• Monitor Mac performance and keep it in good state by checking disk utilization, memory usage, battery status, and CPU usage.

• Speed up your Mac system with 100% security.

• Works well with MacOS Big Sur, OS X 10.15, 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11.

How to erase Mac SSD with Mac Cleaner

Step 1: Download and install this Mac Cleaner on your Mac computer.

Step 2: Launch the software and you will see a simple interface like below, you are able to check Status, Cleaner, and Toolkit in the main interface.

Step 3: In order to erase the hard drive, click 'Cleaner' option in the main interface.

Step 4: Then click 'System Junk' to erase System Cache, Application Cache, System Logs, User Logs, and Localization.

Step 5: Click 'Scan' to scan the system junks on your Mac, it will take a while to finish the scanning process. After that you can click the 'View' option to preview the scan results in case there are some data you don't want to erase.

Step 6: Choose the items you want to clean, and then click the 'Clean' button to erase them from your Mac SSD securely.

After that it will pop up a confirmation window to ask you to confirm that you want to clean the selected system junk, click 'Confirm' to clean system junk on Mac.

You can also clean iPhoto junk, Email junk, Similar photo, iTunes backup junk, Trash bin, Large & Old files, Duplicate files etc. with similar steps above.

Conclusion

How To Clean An Imac

By following this tutorial, you will know how to wipe Mac hard drive securely and completely. Just as we have explained above, it's not a good idea to wipe an SSD completely, it'd be better to clean your Mac SSD with a Mac cleaner application, since it's hard to do a data recovery on Mac SSD.

Summary :

If you connect a drive formatted in Mac to a Windows PC, you’ll be prompted to format it before use. That is to say, you are not allowed to view anything saved on it before formatting. But the question is: if you click Format disk, your data will be ruined. This post from MiniTool will introduce several useful ways to help you with that; please read carefully.

Quick Navigation :

Can You Read Mac Drive on Windows

How To Speed Up My Macbook Pro

Many people doubt that whether they can read Mac drive on Windows. Some took action: they removed the drive from Mac and connected it to a Windows PC properly. But after connecting the Mac-formatted drive to Windows, a prompt window will pop up automatically on the screen, saying that they need to format the disk before use.

Don’t Format the Drive

You should click Cancel instead of Format disk when seeing this prompt. Why? That is simply because the formatting action will damage your data saved on that drive. Is there any other way to read a Mac-formatted drive on Windows? Sure, it is; some effective ways used by other users will be shown to you later on this page.

What Does Formatting a Hard Drive Do

Some users said they clicked on the Format disk button by mistake when seeing the prompt window mentioned above; they were wondering if there’s any way to help them recover a formatted hard drive. Luckily, the answer is yes.

What does disk formatting mean?

Formatting a hard disk/drive refers to delete all the file & folders save on a drive and set a certain file system for it. The formatting action is performed to prepare a data storage device (including hard disk drive, solid-state drive, USB flash drive, and SD card) for initial use. Two of the most obvious results of formatting a hard disk are: deleting data and changing file system.

How To Clean Up My Mac

Besides, there are also other benefits of disk formatting:

  • Get more space on disk.
  • Solve disk problems caused by soft failure.
  • Improve disk/system performance greatly.
  • And so on.

Do you know how to improve Windows 10 performance effectively?

It’s necessary to improve Windows 10 performance effectively since various problems will occur inevitably on a system that has been used for a long time.

Recover Formatted Hard Drive

The first and the most important thing to do after formatting a hard drive is to recover precious data from hard drive. MiniTool Power Data Recovery can be a good data recovery assistant: it’s clean, safe, and professional. Please free download the trial edition to experience this data recovery tool first before you decide to buy it; after that, double click on the setup program to finish installing the software on your Windows computer, on which the Mac hard drives are formatted.

Follow this guide to recover data from Mac formatted external hard drives:

  1. Click Start now at the end of installation to launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery. You can also open it by double clicking on the software icon.
  2. Wait for a few seconds until the disk loading process is finished automatically.
  3. Select Devices from the top of the software pane.
  4. Choose the formatted Mac drive under it.
  5. Double click on the target drive directly or click on the Scan button.
  6. The full scan will be started at once; more and more files and folders will be found during the scan. Please make sure the Mac hard drive is always connected to your computer.
  7. Browse the found items carefully to decide which files are needed and which are not; add a checkmark into the square box in from of all the files you want to recover. If you can’t confirm, go to view the content before recovery by clicking Preview.
  8. Click on the Save button in the lower right corner.
  9. Select a storage path in the pop-up window to store the files waiting to be recovered; please make sure it has enough free space left. (You shouldn’t select the original Mac-formatted drive as the storage location in order to avoid secondary damage.)
  10. Click on the OK button in the same window to confirm your selection.
  11. Then, wait until all the files saved on Mac hard drive have been recovered successfully to appointed place. A prompt window will show up to inform you of the recovery result.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is also a great tool for recovering formatted SD card or broken/corrupted USB stick.

After the data recovery process has been completed, you may transfer back the recovered files to the formatted disk as long as you can confirm that you’ve got back all the files you need.

What about Windows 10 read Mac drive? Please read the following sections.

Can a Mac external drive be read on a PC?

A lot of people are wondering whether they can read Mac drive on Windows 10 with freeware. In fact, there is both free and paid software to help people read Mac drive on PC easily, without formatting the disk. I’ll introduce some of the useful software you can use on Windows 10 to read files and folders from Mac-formatted drive.

Note: Choice 1 ~ 3 is suitable for reading HFS & HFS+; choice 4 ~ 5 is used to read APFS on Windows.

Choice 1: HFSExplorer

Mac

HFSExplorer is completely free; it’s a basic application designed to help users read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. HFSExplorer gives support to various file systems: HFS (the Standard file system on Mac), HFS+ (the Extended file system on Mac OS), HFSX (the Extended Mac OS file system with case sensitive file names), etc.

What Does HFSExplorer Allow You to Do

  • Browse volumes on Mac by using a graphical file system browser.
  • Check the volume related information.
  • Extract files you need (copy files to Windows hard disk free).
  • Mount & read disk images like .dmg and .sparsebundle.
  • Create disk images from the volume on Mac.

The partition schemes including Master Boot Record, GUID Partition Table, and Apple Partition Map are supported by HFSExplorer.

Attention!

You need to install Java first if you don’t have it on your PC since it’s required (Sun's Java SE runtime environment version 5.0 or greater in which OpenJDK works fine).

HFSExplorer: Launch error

No Java runtime environment found. HFSExplorer cannot function without Java.

Press “OK” to open up http://www.java.com where you can download a Java runtime environment for your system.

You should just click OK as prompted to download & install proper runtime environment when seeing the window above.

How to Use HFSExplorer to Read Mac Hard Drive on Windows

HFSExplorer is a good tool to help you read your Mac-formatted drive on your Windows PC.

  1. Connect the Mac-formatted drive to Windows 10 PC.
  2. Run HFSExplorer as administrator.
  3. Select File from the menu bar.
  4. Choose Load file system from device
  5. Click Autodetect to load the connected hard drive.
  6. Choose the files & folders you want to view in the HFS+ drive.
  7. Click Extract in the graphical window.
  8. Select a folder as the destination.
  9. Expand the folder to read Mac drive files on a Windows 10 PC.

Attention:

  • HFS/HFS+/HSFX partitions can all be detected by using HFSExplorer.
  • You can also Select a device or Specify device name manually in step 5.

If the connected external hard drive is not showing up on PC, you can’t detect it in step 5. You must make it appear in Windows first.

Is there any other hard drive reader for Windows? Of course, yes; please move on.

Choice 2: Apple HFS+ Drivers

Another way to access HFS + files in Windows 10 for free is installing Apple HFS + drivers.

Tip: The Apple HFS + drivers only give you read access to the files in Mac-formatted drives.

Steps to Read Mac Drives on PC with Apple HFS + Drivers

First, you should make sure you don’t have Paragon or MacDrive (the hard drive readers I will talk about later) on your Windows computer. If you do, please remove them now.

Second, you should download the correct Windows driver package to your local drive.

Third, you should configure your Windows as follow.

  1. Go to the default download path (Downloads folder) to extract the downloaded zip file.
  2. Find AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys files.
  3. Copy them by pressing Ctrl + C (you can also do it by right clicking & choosing Copy).
  4. Go to this path: C:WindowsSystem32drivers.
  5. Copy them by pressing Ctrl + V (you can also right click on any blank area & choose Paste).
  6. Navigate to the downloaded folder to find Add_AppleHFS.reg file.
  7. Open the .reg file to bring up a Registry Editor prompt window.
  8. Click on the Yes button and then click OK.
  9. Restart your computer to make changes take effect.

Fourth, you should connect the Mac-formatted drive to your PC -> open File Explorer (also called Windows Explorer) -> locate that drive under This PC -> access files you want.

Tip: You may find the File Explorer has stopped working or not responding when trying to open it; please don’t be nervous since this problem can be fixed.

Choice 3: HFS+ for Windows

Though the Paragon HFS+ for Windows is a paid hard driver reader, you’ll love it after using.

What Can Paragon HFS+ for Windows Do for You

  • The speed is fast and the performance is stable.
  • The Mac file systems are integrated into Windows File Explorer.
  • It provides full read and write access to Mac drives formatted with HFS, HFS +, and HFSX (just like other drives in Windows).
  • It allows Windows programs to read from or write to the Mac-formatted drive on Windows.
  • There are additional features that worth the cost.

How Much Does It Cost

The Paragon HFS+ for Windows is sold on the official website for $19.95 with a single seat license; $49.95 with one license worked on 3 PCs.

If you don’t want to spend money in reading Mac drive on Windows, you should download the trial edition; it is free for use for 10 days. You can access, copy files from or to the Mac drive during this period; it’s enough.

Choice 4: MacDrive

If your Mac drive is formatted with APFS (Apple File System), you won’t be able to read Mac hard drive on Windows because there are no free apps designed for it. But you have many choices of paid applications to access & edit Mac drive files on Windows; MacDrive is a popular one designed by Mediafour.

Merits of MacDrive

  • It is used to help users read data from and write data to Mac disks from Windows directly.
  • You can read both APFS and HFS+ drives in File Explorer.
  • It allows you to create and partition Mac disks on your Windows.
  • A graphical interface is offered for Mac-formatted drives verification, format, and repair.
  • It’s a trusted solution which can date back to 1996.

The only drawback of MacDrive seems to be the selling price is higher than some similar tools. You need to pay $49.99 for the Standard version or $69.99 for the Pro version.

Is it worth the price? Yes, if you have such needs; it also includes unique features like support for Mac-formatted RAID disks.

Choice 5: Paragon APFS for Windows

Paragon also designed an APFS for Windows app for reading APFS Mac drive on Windows; it is considered as one of the main competitors of MacDrive.

Features of Paragon APFS for Windows

  • It provides read and write access to Mac drives formatted with APFS.
  • It also allows you to access and edit compressed and cloned files (you can only access the encrypted volumes without making any changes).
  • It gives support to auto-mounting at start-up; the partition tools of MacDrive are not included in this app.

The biggest disadvantage of Paragon APFS for Windows when compared to MacDrive is the HFS+ support. The biggest advantage of Paragon APFS for Windows over MacDrive is the price – it costs only $49.95 for one license worked on 3 PCs.

How To Clean Mac Hard Drive

Of course, there are many other tools available for you to read Mac drives on Windows (10/8/7, etc.).

Bonus Tip

You can format your Mac hard drive to exFAT, which supports both Windows and Mac OS X. In this way, you can get full read and write access to exFAT drives on Windows without any additional third-party software.

The only thing you need to worry is that the data on Mac drives will be removed. So you need to turn to MiniTool Power Data Recovery as mentioned in part 1 to recover the files you need after formatting.

How to format a hard drive? Basically, there are three ways.

  • Right click on the drive in File Explorer -> choose Format.
  • OpenDisk Management -> right click on the target drive -> choose Format.
  • Format Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard – a professional disk manager.

Final Thoughts

How To Clean Mac Hard Drive For Faster Speed

Though you can’t access a Mac-formatted drive on a Windows computer directly, there are useful ways and tools to help you read Mac drive on Windows easily. Please just follow the steps mentioned above and choose the tool depending on your needs.