Could you explain in the form of an analogy? Also, has this improved over time? Does it have anything to do with registry and defrag? Is it different for Mac vs PC? Thank you 🙂
In: Technology
Follow up to your question about defrag: You’ll recall the analogy about hard drives being a file cabinet. While it does store the data, it’s not really in the shape of a file cabinet. Instead imagine a grid; letters going across and numbers going up and down.
When it needs to store some information it’ll take, for example, 5 blocks of space. So it’ll just choose A1 – A5 and put them there. But what if one of those blocks is occupied?
Now being human your first instinct would probably be move that occupied one somewhere else and then lay the 5 blocks from the same program all next to each other. The computer doesn’t do that however. The computer uses a firm “Any available surface” method of filing. So if block A4 is already occupied, it’ll choose A1-A3 & A5-A6 to store the information.
But it does this for everything stored on the hard drive. So a visual representation of the hard drive would be less like a filing cabinet, and more like the warehouse from raiders of the lost arc; along with needing a treasure map to find the relevant information when it tries to pull it. [https://static3.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-warehouse.jpg](https://static3.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-warehouse.jpg)
Any time it needs to put down something new it will find anywhere it can cram a part of it and make a note of “I left pieces here, here, here, here and here’ for when it needs to grab them again. That’s where hard drive speed comes in for computer speed, how fast it can go sorting through all those boxes and pulling the relevant info.
Defragmenting the hard drive is when the computer will actually go through and rearrange these boxes into a fashion that makes more sense; grouping bits of data together in actual patterns rather than at random; so when it needs to find something it’s less like following a treasure map and takes less time.
PSA: Solid State Hard drives (SSD) you do not want to defrag. While they are the raiders style of organization, it’s actually carefully controlled so that it distributes wear and tear evenly on the hard drive; improving it’s lifespan. A normal hard drive once a ‘shelf’ breaks it’s corrupted, and can cause more and more problems as it tries to work around that. SSD’s will calculate and arrange things on the fly so prevent any of those shelves holding boxes from getting an unusual amount of wear and tear; meaning they will last longer without breaking. Defragmenting and manually rearranging the load will mess with it’s carefully designed system and put additional strain on portions of the drive, shortening it’s lifespan and eventually leading to damage and failure. A SSD can last much much longer than a spinning drive hard drive because it’s storage method intentionally sets up to keep it going a longer and messing with that can shorten it’s lifespan.
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