After reading another post about why defragmentation isn’t as necessary with modern devices, i started wondering what exactly fragmentation even is. How and why does it happen and doesn’t it screw up your data?
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Old mechanical hard drives with platters and stylus reader would take longer to travel over the physical magnetic disk in multiple places to pull all the bits of data associated with a program. Defrag consolidates all the data together into one physical chunk on the disk, so the stylus and disk doesn’t have to move around as much or travel as far to access all the data. Modern solid state drives have no moving parts but contain a controller with address bits to each piece of data, so there is no speed decrease by accessing data from multiple places on the drive. The controller directs the drive to each bit of data, and because electrons move at the speed of light, more or less, it doesn’t matter if the data is contained within address bit #1 or #736347, etc… the speed is the same. Defrag is not necessary for SSD.
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