It's virtually free and works wonderfully. I don't think you'll see any marked improvement in performance by cloning a drive and then cloning it back, but if you'd like to try, might I suggest CarbonCopåloner?
SMART SUPPORT for External Drives Techtool Pro 15 now includes improved and updated drivers for reading SMART data on external drives on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. TechTool Pro 5 is a universal tool for Mac performance optimization, which has an option to defrag the Apple computer as well. Techtool Pro continues to support both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. OS X moves files around and degfragments many files on its own, and I'm a staunch believer that "optimizing" OS X does nothing beneficial, since the next time you start using your computer, OS X is moving files back around to where it likes them. Techtool Pro 15 has been fully updated and optimized to support macOS 12, Monterey.
Compare price, features, and reviews of the software side-by-side to make the best choice for your business. For example, back in the days of OS 7/8/9, Norton Speed Disk (the disk optimization portion of Norton Utilities) would put system files, extensions, control panels and the like at the beginning of the drive in contiguous blocks and data/miscellaneous files at the end of the drive in contiguous blocks, leaving a big, empty chunk of free space in the middle. UltimateDefrag using this comparison chart.
optimization does indeed defragment a drive, but optimization has "profiles" which determine where the data is put on the drive depending on what kind of file it encounters. This is different from "optimization," though.
Therefore, the copied files have no fragments - they are on contiguous blocks on the target disk. Then it moves on to the next file, which is written as one big chunk adjacent to the previous chunk. The Volume Structures test in Techtool Pro can be used to identify this damage, while the Volume Rebuild tool can be used to repair it. When the file is copied, it is written to the target disk in one chunk. Volume Structures damage (or directory damage for recovering Windows users) refers to the data stored on a disk that keeps track of your photos, movies, music, and other files on the disk. When you copy data off the drive, the data is copied file-by-file. Copying data off of a drive and then back onto the drive does indeed defrag the drive, and the reason it does is simple.